EXPLAINING CONFLICTING NUMBERS IN HOUSEHOLD MEASUREMENTS The percentage of adult

EXPLAINING CONFLICTING NUMBERS IN HOUSEHOLD MEASUREMENTS
The percentage of adults living with a spouse decreased from 52% to 50% over the past decade. At the same time, living alone became slightly more common: 37 million (15%) adults age 18 and over lived alone in early 2021, up from 33 million (14%) in 2011. The percentage of adults living with an unmarried partner also inched up over the past decade, from 7% to 8% (Though that’s not relevant other than for tax filing purposes – and the marriage penalty in taxation disincentivizes marriage. (there are some suggestions in the literature that this causes duplication of household counts and masks real household income.)

Household: This unit is defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as “all the people who occupy a housing unit.” This includes related family members and all the unrelated people, if any, such as lodgers, foster children, wards, or employees who share the housing unit. A household can consist of a person living alone or multiple unrelated individuals or families living together.

Non-household Individuals (or Non-institutionalized Group Quarters): These are people who live in settings that are not considered households. The U.S. Census Bureau identifies two types of group quarters: institutional (such as prisons, nursing homes, and hospitals) and non-institutional. The latter includes places like college dormitories, military barracks, group homes, and missions. Individuals in non-institutional group quarters are not considered “households” because they typically do not have a separate living arrangement that allows for independent cooking and living from others in the same unit.

The categories of non-household individuals can be broadly enumerated as:

Institutional Group Quarters: These include residents of nursing facilities, mental hospitals, correctional facilities for adults, and juvenile facilities. AFAIK this is around 1%+.

Noninstitutional Group Quarters: These encompass people in college or university student housing, military quarters, emergency and transitional shelters, group homes, and workers’ dormitories. AFAIK this is around 1.2%+

AFAICT: there are conflicting definitions of households – one that includes just a residence with at least one person, and another that includes a residencde with more than one person. (That appears to be a pretty close set of numbers.)
(FWIW, I’m working to find consistency in these numbers because … they’re all over the map. And it appears that there are categorical differences creating inconsistencies.)

In other words household income SHOULD drop and continue to drop as the number of individual households, single mother households, and the number of divorced households, continues to rise.

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