Household Structure & Family Roles

reportOct 3, 2011

Fighting Poverty in a Bad Economy, Americans Move in with Relatives

Without public debate or fanfare, large numbers of Americans enacted their own anti-poverty program in the depths of the Great Recession: They moved in with relatives.
reportSep 27, 2011

Census Bureau: Flaws in Same-Sex Couple Data

The Census Bureau today released its first estimates of the number of same-sex married couples in the U.S., as well as alternatives counts to the published data for same-sex unmarried couples that try to account for data-processing issues.
reportAug 25, 2011

How Accurate Are Counts of Same-Sex Couples?

This posting discusses the challenges for the Census Bureau in counting same-sex couples, married and unmarried. The accuracy of data depends on responses in Census Bureau questionnaires and bureau procedures to collect and edit responses, and the posting describes both.
reportJun 27, 2011

Census Data on Unmarried Partners

This All Things Census posting announces a new Pew Research Center report using census data to explore the economics of cohabitation, which uses census data to compare the financial well-being of adults who are married, living with an unmarried opposite-sex partner, or not living with such a partner or spouse. The Census Bureau is releasing detailed local-level counts of unmarried couples over the summer.
reportJun 27, 2011

Living Together: The Economics of Cohabitation

Cohabitation is an increasingly prevalent lifestyle in the United States. The share of 30- to 44-year-olds living as unmarried couples has more than doubled since the mid-1990s. Adults with lower levels of education—without college degrees—are twice as likely to cohabit as those with college degrees.
reportJun 23, 2011

Census 2010 News Stories: The Changing Family

The ongoing release of so-called SF1 data from the 2010 Census–detailed local-level tabulations about age, families, housing and other topics–has produced a wave of news stories about the changing family. Stories from newspapers in California and Pennsylvania focus especially on same-sex couples.
reportJun 15, 2011

A Tale of Two Fathers

In the last 50 years, fathers have become much more involved in the day-to-day lives of the children they live with. During that same time period, though, the share of fathers living apart from their children has risen dramatically, to 27% in 2010.
reportApr 22, 2011

Census 2010: Household Size Trends

The average size of U.S. households has been declining for decades, but may have grown in recent years, at least in part because of an increase in multi-generational households.
reportApr 22, 2011

Census 2010: Household Size Trends

The average size of U.S. households has been declining for decades, but new Census data may show a reversal of that trend.
reportApr 12, 2011

Are views of marriage affected by the type of family people grew up in?

Senior research staff answer questions from readers relating to all the areas covered by our seven projects, ranging from polling techniques and findings, to media, technology, religious, demographic and global attitudes trends.