Household and Family Structure

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

More than 2,000 demographers, sociologists and others converged on Washington, D.C., last week for the Population Association of America’s annual meeting.

Researchers recently presented some findings that dispute the popular (or academic) wisdom about important aspects of family life and bear upon relevant findings from Pew Research surveys.