Navigating Alignment and Misalignment Across Linked Lives: Intergenerational Relationships in Three‐Generation Hong Kong Chinese Families

ABSTRACT Objective Guided by life course and linked lives perspectives, this study examines how intergenerational relationships develop as patterns of solidarity, ambivalence, and conflict through negotiation across generational positions within three‐generation Hong Kong Chinese families. Background Longer shared lifetimes extend the influence of linked lives on intergenerational relationships. Single‐generation perspectives, dyadic frameworks, and static indicators categorize relationships as supportive, mixed, or strained, but they cannot explain how relationship dynamics emerge and evolve through changing needs, roles, and expectations. Crucially, how cultural‐structural realities, often treated as contextual background, operate within this process remains less clear. Method In‐depth triadic interviews were conducted separately with grandparents, parents, and adult children from 40 families ( N = 120). Transcripts were analyzed abductively through constant comparison at within‐family dyadic and triadic levels and across families. Results The analysis developed a triadic relational framework in which alignment and misalignment served as the processual relational mechanism linking family members' recognition, interpretation, and response to patterns of solidarity, ambivalence, and conflict. Across care, obligation, reciprocity, resources, authority, and communication, workable alignment generated solidarity, containable misalignment sustained ambivalence, and intensified misalignment developed into conflict. Relational grounding and cultural‐structural realities infused this mechanism with emotional, historical, moral, and practical weight, driving family members into continuous relational negotiation across linked lives. Conclusion Intergenerational relationships are dynamic processes continually negotiated and revised across linked lives over the life course.