Family Demography

Abstract

Family demography is a subfield of demography and is the study of the changing nature of intergenerational and gender ties that bind individuals into households and family units. The core of family demography uses basic demographic information collected about household members, including the numbers of members, their relationships to each other, and each person's sex, age, and marital status, to describe the composition of families and households. Composition describes the structure of families and households: the set of statuses and associated roles that are important for the functioning of society. American families and households have diverse and complex structures. For example, households can contain married couples, cohabiting couples, single mothers, children, grandparents, other relatives (e.g., brothers, sisters, or in‐laws), roommates, or simply one person living alone. Family composition is the result of demographic processes or family related events such as marriage, divorce, and fertility or childbearing. Changes in the timing, number, and sequences of these events transform family and household composition. Family demographers aggregate the composition and processes of individual families into larger units (e.g., nations, states, counties, neighborhoods) to examine family change in societies and other units. They aggregate them separately by other social and economic groups (e.g., racial and ethnic groups, poor families, immigrants) and by countries to examine family variation. Thus, family demographers study family change and variation to understand both individual and societal behavior.