How can attention to kinship enhance the qualitative study of public services, such as schooling and health promotion? This question underscores several qualitative studies in which the authors have been involved, each engaging what we call the 'family sample' method summarized here. Involving research in Europe, Africa, North and South Americas, and the Caribbean, these studies take family dynamics not as the object of analysis but as a tool for assessing how in a globalizing world, tensions between rapid social change and pressures to maintain continuity with the past (imagined and real) are balanced by people who together affirm a deep sense of relatedness. The family sample is not merely a method of data collection but a means of reorienting the researcher in both the processes of recruitment and analysis, to the complexity of community and to contradictions in the lives, statements, and actions of research participants. [This content is provided in the format of an e-book.]