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The differences between households today and in the past are often
exaggerated, Richard Wall told a lunchtime meeting in March.
These misconceptions are important, because false impressions of the
family patterns of past societies encourage unrealistic expectations of
the role families can play in contemporary society. Wall challenged a
number of common misconceptions concerning family structures, such as
the assertion that lone parenthood is somehow a `new' phenomenon, or
that the English family now closely resembles its counterparts elsewhere
in Europe. Central and local government, welfare agencies and commercial
organizations all needed comprehensive, accurate and timely data on
household and family composition: Wall urged that the Office of
Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS) should collaborate with other
European statistical agencies and researchers and with the private
sector in order to produce a standard set of tabulations on household
structure that could be applied to any population. Wall noted that household composition has changed drastically in many western societies in recent decades, but a comparison of present-day households with those of pre-industrial communities reveals some unexpected similarities. It has often been assumed that families in the past were more caring and more prepared to take needy relatives into their homes. But then, as now, households included few relatives other than parents with their unmarried children. Nor is there any evidence that the present-day incidence of one-parent families (20% of households with children) is in any way exceptional. The increased incidence of divorce in the twentieth century has returned the proportion of one-parent families to a level comparable with that produced by early widowhood in the seventeenth century: it is the intervening centuries that were the exceptions. There has also been a dramatic increase in the number of people living alone, especially elderly women. Some of these changes are of fairly recent origin: the composition of UK households containing elderly persons changed as much between the 1960s and the 1980s as between the pre-industrial era and the 1960s. Wall also discussed the variation in household composition across European countries. Southern and Eastern Europe, for example, have much lower proportions of one-person households: one in ten households in Cyprus, for example, and one in five in Italy, compared with one in three households in Sweden. The latest round of censuses conducted in the early 1980s has produced no evidence of a reduction in cross-country variations in the frequency of persons living alone. More detailed research on household formation is, however, hampered by the failure to agree on standard definitions of such basic concepts as `family' and `child', and by inconsistencies among countries in defining the role of individuals within the household. Wall urged that research efforts should now be directed towards the production of a standard set of tabulations of household type that could be applied to any population. In every British census between 1861 and 1951, although the Registrar General asked for details of the relationship of every person to the head of the household, the information was never used. The omission puzzled Wall: the family was viewed as an important constituent of society. The situation today is at first sight much improved. Every British Census since 1951 has reported on the composition of the household and since 1970 it has been possible to follow the pace of annual change by consulting the General Household Survey, at least for those households that are willing to participate in it. Furthermore, each decennial Census is preceded by consultation with statisticians and by the publication of guidelines on the definitions and classifications of households and families. Detailed information on British households should therefore be available in a form comparable with that presented elsewhere. But closer examination revealed that progress had been far from satisfactory, according to Wall: only the most basic information on families and households (such as the number of men and women living alone) is available for the majority of European countries. In England for example, OPCS does not make available either a distribution of the population by age, sex and membership of a family, nor a distribution by age, sex and relationship to the household head. Such information was important, Wall argued. Central and local government, welfare agencies and commercial organizations all need to be informed about the pace of change in residence patterns, for example: if we are unsure how the existing housing stock is being used, we cannot make the right decisions about housing provision in the future. Consumption patterns are also heavily influenced by household size and composition. Without a sustained commitment from within OPCS to the study of the family and the household, the 1991 Census is likely to be no more successful than that of 1981, according to Wall. But not all the work should be left to OPCS: other government departments may not be making full use of census data. There was also a strong case for expanding the number of projects undertaken jointly by OPCS and outside agencies or private researchers. Wall cited two such joint research projects with which he had been associated: the completion of the first detailed account of the changes in family and household composition in England and Wales between 1891 and 1921, and a detailed examination of the characteristics of families and households in 1971 and 1981. The second project made use of the information on households included in OPCS's Longitudinal Study. This latter project, conducted in conjunction with City University, CEPR and INSEE, involved the preparation and publication of a set of tables on residence patterns in England and France within as consistent a framework as possible, given the definitions of the household used in each country. |
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