Family & Relationships

This posting discusses the challenges for the Census Bureau in counting same-sex couples, married and unmarried. The accuracy of data depends on responses in Census Bureau questionnaires and bureau procedures to collect and edit responses, and the posting describes both.

Americans are considerably more likely than other publics polled to say that parents do not put enough pressure on their children, while China is the only country in which a majority sees parents putting too much pressure on students. More than six-in-ten Americans say that parents do not put enough pressure on their children to do well in school, while about two-thirds of the Chinese public take the opposite position.

Among adults ages 30 to 44, 7% lived with an opposite-sex partner as an unmarried couple in 2009.

This All Things Census posting announces a new Pew Research Center report using census data to explore the economics of cohabitation, which uses census data to compare the financial well-being of adults who are married, living with an unmarried opposite-sex partner, or not living with such a partner or spouse. The Census Bureau is releasing detailed local-level counts of unmarried couples over the summer.

The ongoing release of so-called SF1 data from the 2010 Census--detailed local-level tabulations about age, families, housing and other topics--has produced a wave of news stories about the changing family. Stories from newspapers in California and Pennsylvania focus especially on same-sex couples.

In the last 50 years, fathers have become much more involved in the day-to-day lives of the children they live with. During that same time period, though, the share of fathers living apart from their children has risen dramatically, to 27% in 2010.

While the public is divided over same-sex marriage, a majority of Americans (58%) say that homosexuality should be accepted, rather than discouraged, by society. Among younger people in particular, there is broad support for societal acceptance of homosexuality. More than six-in-ten (63%) of those younger than 50 – 69% of those younger than 30 – […]

While the public is divided over same-sex marriage, a majority of Americans (58%) say that homosexuality should be accepted, rather than discouraged, by society. But there are wide political and religious differences in opinions on this measure.

The average size of U.S. households has been declining for decades, but may have grown in recent years, at least in part because of an increase in multi-generational households.