kinship can also refer to a principle by which individuals or groups of individuals are organized into social groups, roles, categories and genealogy by means of kinship terminologies. family relations can be represented concretely (mother, brother, grandfather) or abstractly by degrees of relationship (kinship distance). a relationship may be relative (e.g. a father in relation to a child) or reflect an absolute (e.g. the difference between a mother and a childless woman). degrees of relationship are not identical to heirship or legal succession. many codes of ethics consider the bond of kinship as creating obligations between the related persons stronger than those between strangers, as in confucian filial piety.