| Source: http://ca.rand.org/stats/census/censusdefs.html (26 December 2006) | |
| Family | A householder and one or more people living in the same household who are related to the householder by birth, marriage, or adoption. |
| Household | Includes all of the people who occupy a housing unit. |
| Housing Unit | A house, an apartment, a mobile home, a group of rooms, or a single room that is occupied as separate living quarters. |
There are clear issues and ambiguities in those definitions, however. What about people living in group quarters, such as a dormitory: are those people part of one household? What about a child who travels during the week to attend school and then returns to her "family" for the weekend: in what household does that child reside? What if a single housing unit is occupied by more than one family because of a humanitarian emergency? How do the definitions given above translate to a refugee camp? To a polygamous society in which each wife lives in a separate housing unit?
The United Nations gives a different, and more open, set of guidelines for defining families, households, and housing units, as shown below:
| Family | "The family within the household, a concept of particular interest, is defined as those members of the household who are related, to a specified degree, through blood, adoption or marriage. The degree of relationship used in determining the limits of the family in this sense is dependent upon the uses to which the data are to be put and so cannot be established for worldwide use." [1] |
| Household | "The concept of household is based on the arrangements made by persons, individually or in groups, for providing themselves with food or other essentials for living. A household may be either: a) a one-person household, that is to say, a person who makes provision for his or her food or other essentials for living without combining with any other person to form part of a multi-person household; or b) a multi-person household, that is to say, a group of two or more persons living together who make common provision for food or other essentials for living... those households without a shelter that would fall within the scope of living quarters. They carry their few possessions with them, sleeping in the streets, in doorways or on piers, or in any other space, on a more or less random basis.” [2] |
| Housing Unit | "A housing unit is a separate and independent place of abode intended for habitation by a single household, though it may be occupied by more than one households..." [3] |
Different definitions may be more or less appropriate in different circumstances. For example, one can define a household as "those who share a cooking pot," and that definition may work better in a refugee camp than the definitions given above. For almost all surveys of a general population, rules for defining group quarters must be created, and rules for a term of residency, for example, those who have shared a cooking pot for the past four weeks, must also be created. Most important, because the structure of a family or household is culturally-dependent, local cultural norms must be considered when a definition for a family or household is created.
1. See Households and Families.
2. See United Nations Demographic Yearbook Review.
3. See Consumption and Production Patterns.