Perhaps they all live alone
A quip about marketing to single people caught my eye this morning, in a light-hearted article about housewares: “A visitor from another planet… might have the following impressions. These Earth people love coffee and little brightly colored, high-tech coffee makers, but perhaps they all live alone, for they seem obsessed with something called “single-serve units.””
Curious about whether the living-alone numbers had recently changed, I dug into the five-year estimates of the American Community Survey. (Statistics about un/marriage remain the 2nd most popular topic among visitors to this website. I’d love to know more about what you’re looking for and whether you find it. Please take a moment to give us valuable feedback!)
For the record, here’s how many of us really do live alone, and how the rest of us live:
April 7th, 2011 at 11:04 pm
Wonderful graphs! When is the mainstream media, print and broadcast, going to ever get the true picture?
April 8th, 2011 at 4:01 pm
glad you like ‘em!
April 8th, 2011 at 4:56 pm
I wonder if “2+ people not related by blood or marriage” is under-counted. Many people who live in dorms or with roommates would show up on surveys as still being a part of the household they lived in while they were minors.
April 8th, 2011 at 5:10 pm
Good question – the Census does not include people living in “group quarters” like dorms when it estimate figures for households, but their parents probably do include them when they report who are their household members. More generally, since group quarters are not included, unrelated people living together are under-counted by definition. We’re only seeing “of people living in households, how many are….” For more on how the Census defines its terms, check out http://www.unmarried.org/governmentterminology.html