On the relationship between household composition and population age distribution

Summary Composition of households by age of head and by age of other household members has recently been presented in a convenient algebraic expression, the household composition matrix. It has been shown that this matrix operates as a linear transformation from the vector of household distribution by age of head to the vector of population age distribution. A further analysis will show that the first row of the matrix may be interpreted as representing a vector of average household fertility rates. If the linear relationship between household and population distributions is fully implemented, then a relationship between household fertility and the size of the youngest age group can be derived. If w is the population age distribution and w (1) is the number of persons in the youngest age group, then: where α is the first row of the household composition matrix with its first element eliminated, C is the household composition matrix with its first row and first column eliminated, and Ψ is the vector w with its first element, w (1) eliminated. Extension of this result will enable simultaneous projection of population and households, suitable for computer application to conventional five-year age groups.     

A combined Brass-random walk approach to probabilistic household forecasting: Denmark,Finland, and the Netherlands, 2011–2041

Probabilistic household forecasts to 2041 are presented for Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands. Future trends in fertility, mortality and international migration are taken from official population forecasts. Time series of shares of the population in six different household positions are modelled as random walks with drift. Brass’ relational model preserves the age patterns of the household shares. Probabilistic forecasts for households are computed by combining predictive distributions for the household shares with predictive distributions of the populations, specific for age and sex. If current trends in the three countries continue, we will witness a development towards more and smaller households, often driven by increasing numbers of persons who live alone. We can be quite certain that by 2041, there will be between two and four times as many persons aged 80 and over who live alone when compared with the situation in 2011.     

Household structure and housing needs

This paper is mainly derived from the material presented in the preceding article by S. P. Brown. Indeed, while the previous analysis is of considerable intrinsic interest, the hypothetical population was constructed and its family distribution was shown for the purpose of providing a basis for estimates of housing needs. For several reasons it appeared to be essential to have such a basis. First, any housing programme has to take the future, as well as the present, distribution of households by type and size into account. Secondly, such a programme has to be designed so as not to prevent household formation—there should be dwellings for all potential households, so that involuntary doubling-up need not occur. Thirdly, most residential areas should have dwellings for an eventually stable population, that is, for one which has variety of age groups and of household types, and also fair stability of housing demand. Estimates of the distribution of potential ‘households’ could be derived from the ‘family’ distribution of the hypothetical population which reflects current demographic trends. Thus although this population is a ‘hypothetical’ one, it provides a realistic premise for considering housing needs, and because it is a ‘stationary’ one, it provides an especially suitable premise. Moreover, since the demographic characteristics of its ‘families’ and therefore of its potential households were established in far greater detail than has ever been the case in sample surveys of existing households, it was possible to classify households in the terms which appear to be most appropriate for the first draft of a housing programme, irrespective of social and economic variations in demand.

The first stage in following up Mr Brown's analysis was the conversion of ‘families’ into ‘households’. Two examples of the possible household distribution of the hypothetical population are presented. Example A, which gives a realistic, but not extreme, picture of the conversion of families into households, is used for the subsequent detailed analysis, while broader figures for distribution B are also included.

In the second stage the various types of household had to be distinguished. For estimating housing needs, two interrelated criteria of household classification are relevant—first, the stage in the life of a household, especially appropriate in considering space requirements; secondly, the age composition of households, which largely determines the type of dwelling needed.

The detailed distribution of households by size and type, based on this classification, is further translated into a distribution of dwellings by type and size. For this purpose, additional assumptions about the number of rooms and the type of dwelling needed by households of various types are introduced and applied to the hypothetical population, both to household distributions A and B. These assumptions are not based on accepted standards, nor do they suggest standards. They are merely used for the purpose of illustrating a possible method of estimating housing needs on the basis of a detailed picture of household structure. They are further designed to represent one possible compromise between economy in dwelling distribution, on the one hand, and flexibility of space for individual households, on the other.

In the final sections of the paper, the implications of the dwelling distributions here presented are discussed in relation to household mobility, and also with reference to the necessity for reconciling short-term and long-term housing needs in any housing programme.     

A multi-dimensional model for projecting family households--with an illustrative numerical application

"This paper develops a multi-dimensional model for projecting households and population. The model is constructed to ensure consistency between the demographic events occurring to males and females as well as to parents and children. The model permits projection of characteristics of households, their members, and population structure, using data that are usually available from conventional sources. Unlike the traditional headship-rate method, our model can closely link the projected households with demographic rates. The model includes both nuclear and three-generation households, so that it can be used for countries where nuclear households are dominant and for countries where nuclear and three-generation households are both important. The illustrative application to China, although brief, provides some policy-relevant information about future trends of Chinese household size, structure, and the age and sex distribution of the population, with a focus on the elderly."     

Parameters of Household Composition as Demographic Measures

Cross-sectional data, such as Census statistics, enable the re-enactment of household lifecourse through the construction of the household composition matrix, a tabulation of persons in households by their age and bythe age of their corresponding household-heads. Household lifecourse is represented in the household composition matrix somewhat analogously to survivorship in a life-table in demography. A measure of household lifecourse is the average household size, specific to age of household-head. Associated with the age-specific household size is the age-interval 0–4, which yields average number of children present in households, also by age of head. Trajectories of re-enacted household lifecourses for Phoenix and for the State ofArizona are depicted here to track the gamma probability density function. Through this relationship also the association between household size, children per household, and fertility emerges. To the extent that housing conditions or tenure impact average household size, or other aspects of household composition, fertility in particular is discerned as a housing- related demographic attribute of households. Household size and headship ratio, both specific to age of head, are here shown to be analytically related to the household composition matrix, their product yielding the age-specific headship coefficient. As a measure incorporating parameters of households and dwellers, thus also characterizingoccupied dwellingunits, the headshipcoefficient emerges as a demographic indicator of housing in a community.     

New household projections for the united states

This paper reviews the methods used to prepare the new household projections for the United States that were recently issued by the Bureau of the Census and examines the effect on the resulting number of households of the assumptions made about future marriages and future proportions of household heads in the population.One population projection series was used, since all series are identical for the adult population. Marriage assumptions were generated by assuming various outcomes of the marriage squeeze (defined as the excess of females relative to the number of males in the main ages at marriage in the next few years). Assumptions about proportions of household heads were generated by assuming, in varying degrees, continuation of recent trends in these proportions.Projected changes in marriage and in the proportions of household heads in the population account for one-fourth to one-third of the projected increase in the number of households; the remaining increase is attributable to projected changes in the size and structure of the adult population. Varying the assumed proportions of household heads produces greater differences in the projected total number of households than does varying the marriage assumptions used here. Nevertheless, the various possible outcomes of the marriage squeeze, as represented by the assumptions used, produce significantly different projections of increases in the number of young husband-wife households.The most striking finding is that by 1985, proportions of household heads among the population not "married, spouse present" may well rise to such a level that over the long term, the smaller the number of persons who marry, the larger will be the number of households.     

State population and household estimates,with age,sex, and components of change: 1981-87

This report contains provisional US state estimates of 1) the resident and civilian populations and of households for July 1, 1987, 2) revised annual population and household estimates for July 1, 1981-1986, and 3) components of population change for the 1980-1987 period. Also shown are annual age estimates and median age of the resident population of states, 1981-1987, by sex for 10-year age groups and selected broad age groups. Florida passed Pennsylvania to become the 4th most populous state in 1987, ranking behind California, New York, and Texas. Alaska and Louisiana both registered population losses for the 1st time this decade, while West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Wyoming again had population declines. Several agriculture-based states--Iowa, North Dakota, and Nebraska--marked another year of population declines. California and Florida each gained more than 2 million persons through net immigration since 1980, and Texas over 1.2 million. The 25-44 year-olds are the most rapidly growing age group in the 1980s, increasing by 23.8%. This age group now constitutes almost 1/3 (31.9%) of the US population. US median age continues to climb upward, increasing from 30 years in 1980 to 32.1 years in 1987. The Northeast continues as the region with the highest median age (33.7) and the highest proportion of elderly (13.5% aged 65 and over). Largely because of changes in the age structure, households increased faster than the total population from 1980-1987 (12% versus 7.4%). The 4 states that lost population between 1980 and 1987--Ohio, Michigan, Iowa, and West Virginia--all had increases in households during the same period. While the Northeast and Midwest together accounted for only 10.8% of national population growth in the 1980-1987 period, they accounted for 26.9% of the national increase in households. California, Texas, and Florida accounted for 52.4% of national population growth from 1980 to 1987, but only for 36.5% of household growth.     

Family household and nuptiality changes: a search for some explanations from the recent past

Using the demographic transition framework as a basis for analysis, the author examines the levels, trends, and differentials in household size and structure in the Philippines. Time-series data on average household size from the censuses show that the changes observed over time are closely associated with or have run parallel to the shifts in mortality and fertility. Data from the 1968, 1973, and 1983 National Demographic Surveys revealed small increases in 1-person households, modest increases in small-sized and moderate-sized households, and substantial decreases in large-sized households. The data also disclosed structural shifts among various types of family households. Between 1968 and 1983, family households experienced increasing nuclearization. While expectation for support in old age has somewhat diminished recently, parents' preference to join their daughters will have the effect of increasing the opportunity of females to head households. More highly educated persons exhibited a greater tendency to head the bigger-sized, extended family household, although this has diminished somewhat lately. Increases in the age at 1st marriage of both males and females affect the life span of family households, especially nuclear households. A multivariate analysis using macrolevel data as inputs demonstrated the very strong influences of the factors of desirability of marriage, availability of mate, and urbanization on the marriage pattern. Enhancing employment opportunities and creating appropriate mechanisms through which present incomes may be increased in the hinterlands under various rural development programs may help to diminish the values attached to children. The provision of more and better facilities for higher education especially in the disadvantaged provinces will enable young people, especially females, to gain access to higher learning, thus providing alternatives to early marriage and childbearing.     

Assessing Changes in Household Socioeconomic Status in Rural South Africa, 2001–2013: A Distributional Analysis Using Household Asset Indicators

Understanding the distribution of socioeconomic status (SES) and its temporal dynamics within a population is critical to ensure that policies and interventions adequately and equitably contribute to the well-being and life chances of all individuals. This study assesses the dynamics of SES in a typical rural South African setting over the period 2001–2013 using data on household assets from the Agincourt Health and Demographic Surveillance System. Three SES indices, an absolute index, principal component analysis index and multiple correspondence analysis index, are constructed from the household asset indicators. Relative distribution methods are then applied to the indices to assess changes over time in the distribution of SES with special focus on location and shape shifts. Results show that the proportion of households that own assets associated with greater modern wealth has substantially increased over time. In addition, relative distributions in all three indices show that the median SES index value has shifted up and the distribution has become less polarized and is converging towards the middle. However, the convergence is larger from the upper tail than from the lower tail, which suggests that the improvement in SES has been slower for poorer households. The results also show persistent ethnic differences in SES with households of former Mozambican refugees being at a disadvantage. From a methodological perspective, the study findings demonstrate the comparability of the easy-to-compute absolute index to other SES indices constructed using more advanced statistical techniques in assessing household SES.     

A VARYING-COEFFICIENT APPROACH TO ESTIMATION AND EXTRAPOLATION OF HOUSEHOLD SIZE

Household formation analysis is both a multidimensional economical and statistical problem of great complexity. Since most of the literature tries to incorporate multiple economic aspects, there is, considering the extraordinary practical relevance of the problem, a remarkable gap between theory and application in this field. This paper tries to diminish this gap by a comprehensive treatise on the statistical site of the problem. Thus, we develop a model of household composition, where the evolution of the household membership rates is captured by a logit link-function and a multinomial distribution, which automatically fulfills the non-negativity and adding-up restrictions of the underlying probabilities. We use a varying-coefficients procedure by polynomially smoothing the household membership rates over age for every household size class and assuming a linear predictor in other variables. As an application we estimated and extrapolated the distribution of household sizes of an autonomous region using population register data. Our sample consisted of approximately 450,000 people living in about 170,000 households, grouped into nine different household size classes and classified into age classes from 0 to 90. The data covers a time span of 12 years, from 1986 to 1997. Empirical results show the robustness of the procedure even in case of low cell frequencies. Thus, there is no need for regional or age-group aggregations.     

中国分代家庭户的空间分布特征研究

家庭是社会的基本组成单位,家庭户结构的变化直接影响到社会生活的各个方面,家庭户代际结构的分布则能从直观上认识家庭户结构。本文基于2000年第五次全国人口普查的分代家庭户数据及相关资料,以空间自相关分析为基础,对五普数据中的分代家庭户比例分布进行了初步分析。发现其空间分布特征呈现明显的正相关性。为了进一步研究这种空间分布,采用GIS方法得到分代家庭户比分布图,分析发现：二代户仍然是中国家庭户的主要模式;不同地区分代家庭户的分布呈现明显的差异,北方地区的二代户比例最高;三代户与四代以上户分布特征相似,主要集中在西南地区;分代家雇户的分布与绎济发展水平、宗教信仰和民族风俗密切相关．     

Household Composition,Extended Kinship,and Reproduction in Taiwan: 1965–1985

Co-residence of a married couple with the husband's parents continues to be an important aspect of family life in Taiwan. This form of household extension continues despite Taiwan's industrialization and convergence with a Western model of consumption, and despite the increase in the prevalence of nuclear households over the past twenty years. Increases in nuclear units are associated primarily with declines in proportions living in households that are extended both laterally and across generations, while the percentage living with a parent in a stem household has declined only modestly since 1973. In all, declines in co-residence notwithstanding, in 1985 nearly half the respondents resided in extended units. In 1985, as in 1980, a history of residence in an extended household was related to more traditional reproductive behaviour.     

Household and Living Arrangement Projections at the Subnational Level: An Extended Cohort-Component Approach

This article presents the core methodological ideas and empirical assessments of an extended cohort-component approach (known as the “ProFamy model”), and applications to simultaneously project household composition, living arrangements, and population sizes–gender structures at the subnational level in the United States. Comparisons of projections from 1990 to 2000 using this approach with census counts in 2000 for each of the 50 states and Washington, DC show that 68.0 %, 17.0 %, 11.2 %, and 3.8 % of the absolute percentage errors are <3.0 %, 3.0 % to 4.99 %, 5.0 % to 9.99 %, and ≥10.0 %, respectively. Another analysis compares average forecast errors between the extended cohort-component approach and the still widely used classic headship-rate method, by projecting number-of-bedrooms–specific housing demands from 1990 to 2000 and then comparing those projections with census counts in 2000 for each of the 50 states and Washington, DC. The results demonstrate that, compared with the extended cohort-component approach, the headship-rate method produces substantially more serious forecast errors because it cannot project households by size while the extended cohort-component approach projects detailed household sizes. We also present illustrative household and living arrangement projections for the five decades from 2000 to 2050, with medium-, small-, and large-family scenarios for each of the 50 states; Washington, DC; six counties of southern California; and the Minneapolis–St. Paul metropolitan area. Among many interesting numerical outcomes of household and living arrangement projections with medium, low, and high bounds, the aging of American households over the next few decades across all states/areas is particularly striking. Finally, the limitations of the present study and potential future lines of research are discussed.     

Trajectories of Fertility and Household Composition in the Demographic Profile of the Czech Republic

The household composition matrix is a representation of the demographic structure of households, specific to age groups of household members and household heads. As such, the matrix reflects also the environmental conditions, housing in particular, that mould households' demographic structure. By specifically depicting the presence of children in households, household composition could be viewed as gauging fertility within the context of housing conditions. This stance is examined in an application to Czech census data for the year 1991, at the commencement of an intense process of socio-economic transformation that accompanied the collapse of communism across Eastern Europe. Within this process, housing had an inadvertent impact upon the structure of households in general, and upon fertility decline in particular. By using the standard matrix representation of household composition, correspondence between trajectories of age-specific fertility and household composition emerge throughout the Czech Republic. This correspondence illustrates the potential household composition analysis carries for fertility measurement and estimation in rapidly changing economic environments.     

Migrant remittances in Thailand: Economic necessity or social norm?

The remittances of internal migrants contribute in various ways to the well-being of their households of origin. This study examines the significance of selected socio-economic and demographic factors associated with remittance behaviour in Thailand as characterized by the propensity to remit and amount remitted. The extent to which remittances affect the living standard of house-holds left behind is also appraised. The analyses suggest that in Thailand sending remittances is a practice rooted in altruism which enables out-migrants to retain personal contact with their households of origin for an extended time. Thus, it is widely exercised regardless of the economic needs of the household. At the same time, out-migration is an effective means for low-income households to quickly overcome shortages of income. The sustenance of poor households might have been difficult without remittances. From a macro-perspective, remittances contribute to the equalization of the income distribution among households having out-migrants.     

Using census data for household projections: an overview of results from the HOMES Project

"This article provides an overview of the household projection model HOMES [a computer model developed to forecast the number and characteristics of households] and presents new household projections for six countries--China, Indonesia, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines. The household projections are based on recently released population projections from The World Bank and on rules governing living arrangements quantified with the latest available census or demographic survey for each country. Growth in the number of households to the year 2030 is projected along with changes in household membership and the dependency burden."     

Polarisation of Non-standard Employment in Europe: Exploring a Missing Piece of the Inequality Puzzle

The rise in non-standard employment inspired many scholars to study the social consequences of these new employment forms. Most research focusses on individuals working non-standard. With the increase in dual earnership, however, we need a household perspective. This study therefore develops the notion of household non-standard employment and applies a polarisation index to examine the distribution of non-standard work over dual earner couples. This polarisation index compares the actual rate of household non-standard employment with a counterfactual rate when non-standard employment would be randomly distributed over households. Drawing on EU-SILC 2011, we define non-standard workers as individuals who worked during the previous year, but not full-year full-time. The results indicate that the levels of polarisation vary considerably across countries. Because especially women do not work full-time, polarisation is highly negative since it is less likely to find clustering of non-standard work within households. This pattern is dominant in Continental European countries, but also observable in Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon countries. On the other hand, in Eastern and Southern European countries, non-standard employment is concentrated in some households, mainly because of the inability of its members to work full-year. Common characteristics of household members known to be associated with non-standard employment, like age and education, explain little of the levels of non-standard employment polarisation.     

The index of overall headship: A simple measure of household complexity standardized for age and sex

This paper develops and tests an age-sex standardized measure of household complexity, defined broadly as the tendency of adults (other than spouses) to head their own households or to share households. The aim is a measure of household complexity which can be computed with a minimum of demographic data, namely, data on number of households and on the population by age and sex. The procedure is similar to that of Coale for fertility measurement (Coale, 1969); it is a form of indirect standardization in which the actual number of households is related to the number that would exist if maximum age-sex-specific household headship rates were to apply. Various forms of this indirectly standardized measure show a correlation of better than 0.9 with directly standardized measures for a sample of 33 nations for which requisite data are available. The new measure promises to extend considerably the geographical and temporal range of comparable empirical measures of household complexity.     

American Indian household structure and income

We use the 1980 Public-Use Microdata Sample to consider the relationship between household structure and economic well-being among American Indians. We focus on the total U.S. Indian population and on the residents of 19 "Indian states" where there has been relatively little growth in the Indian population by means of changes in racial self-identification. Using Sweet's (1984) scheme of household types, we find that the prevalence among Indians of female-headed households with children is intermediate between that among blacks and whites, but the prevalence of couple-headed households with children is highest among Indians. Racial differences in the distribution of household types and differences in average household size are important determinants of black-white and Indian-white differences in average household income.