At the US Census Bureau...
From the definition of "family household":
... The count of family household members differs from the count of family members, however, in that the family household members include all people living in the household, whereas family members include only the householder and his/her relatives.
From the definition of "family":
... The number of families is equal to the number of family households, however, the count of family members differs from the count of family household members because family household members include any non-relatives living in the household.
In their definition of "family" quoted above, I would change the first comma to a period, and use a capital "H" for "however". It is a simple fix.
The simplicity of the fix, unfortunately, may make it seem as if the error is not a significant one. However, the error is significant.
(The simple fix should NOT be made to their definition of "family household".)
For me it is a problem. I got distracted because they don't know how to punctuate the word "however". Because I got distracted I'm not going to remember the definitions. When I need them again, I'll have to look them up again.
2 comments:
The error is significant. And shouldn’t there be a “may” about counts differing? Or is there only a count of family household members when there are non-relatives?
I would be a deeply unhappy civil servant.
Hey Michael.
> And shouldn’t there be a “may” about counts differing?
I see your point. I missed it until now.
I didn't present the context. I think the context matters in this case.
In any particular household, the counts *may* differ, as you indicate. But in numbers for the nation, well, the totals are almost guaranteed to differ. No! The numbers DO differ. They say it after the problematic 'however': "the count of family members differs from the count of family household members ..."
In the spreadsheet they provide stats on "All households" and "Family households". By the way, the percentage of all households that are family households has fallen from 91.5% in 1947 to 64.6% in 2021. The decline appears to have slowed around 1981. (I don't explain it, I'm just looking at it.) Here's the graph.
> I would be a deeply unhappy civil servant.
And then there's the word "homeownership". FRED turns up more than 4000 data sets for a search of that word, and Google doesn't bother to ask if I meant home ownership.
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