Who lives with whom? Individual versus household measures

Conceived of as a contribution to the methodological debate over the relative desirability of measuring living arrangements in terms of households or in terms of individuals, the study develops formal relationships between household characteristics measured among the set of households and those measured among the set of individuals. Empirical evidence is presented about what difference it makes to use households rather than individuals as the units of analysis, and some measurement tools are developed for analyzing components of change in the prevalence of particular living arrangements. The latter are illustrated with results from representative national samples of the U.S. population in 1910 and 1980.