Category: Statistics

Why Do Voting Opinion Polls Get it Wrong So Often?

Surveys which ask how people intend to vote in major elections seem to get it wrong more often than not, but why is this?

Taking the averages of all nine first and then final polls for the UK general election 2017, the predictions for the Conservatives show them down from 46% to 44%; and Labour up from 26% to 36%.

voting intention 2017 general election

The actual vote share following the result of the general election shows the Conservatives at 42% and Labour at 40% share of the vote.

2017 election result share of vote UK

Writing in The Guardian, David Lipsey notes that ‘The polls’ results in British general elections recently have not been impressive. They were rightish (in the sense of picking the right winner) in 1997, 2001, 2005 and 2010. They were catastrophically wrong in 1992 and 2015. As they would pick the right winner by chance one time in two, an actual success rate of 67%, against success by pin of 50%, is not impressive.’

So why do the pollsters get it wrong so often?

Firstly, there is a plus or minus 2 or 3% statistical margin of error in a poll – so if a poll shows the Tories on 40% and Labour on 34%, this could mean that the real situation is Tory 43%, Labour 31% – a 12 point lead. Or it could mean both Tory and Labour are on 37%, neck and neck.

This is demonstrated by these handy diagrams from YouGov’s polling data on voting intentions during the run up to the 2017 UK general election…

Voting Intention 2017 Election 

Statistics Margin Error.png

Seat estimates 2017 General Election

Seat Estimates

Based on the above, taking into account margin for error, it is impossible to predict who would have won a higher proportion of the votes and more seats out of Labour and the Tories.

Secondly, the pollsters have no way of knowing whether they are interviewing a representative sample.

When approached by a pollster most voters refuse to answer and the pollster has very little idea whether these non-respondents are or are not differently inclined from those who do respond. In the trade, this is referred to as polling’s “dirty little secret”.

Thirdly, the link between demographic data and voting patterns is less clear today – it used to be possible to triangulate polling data with demographic data from previous election results, but voter de-alignment now means that such data is now less reliable as a source of triangulating the opinion polls survey data, meaning pollsters are more in the dark than ever.

Fourthly, a whole load of other factors affected people’s actual voting behaviour in this 2017 election and maybe the polls  failed to capture this?

David Cowley from the BBC notes that…. ‘it seems that whether people voted Leave or Remain in 2016’s European referendum played a significant part in whether they voted Conservative or Labour this time…. Did the 2017 campaign polls factor this sufficiently into the modelling of their data? If younger voters came out in bigger numbers, were the polls equipped to capture this, when all experience for many years has shown this age group recording the lowest turnout?’

So it would seem that voting-intention surveys have always had limited validity, and that, if anything, this validity problem is getting worse…. after years of over-estimating the number of Labour votes, they’ve now swung right back the other way to underestimating the popularity of Labour.

Having said that these polls are not entirely useless, they did still manage to predict that the Tories would win more votes and seats than Labour, but they just got the difference between them oh so very wrong.

The problem of obtaining representative samples (these days)

According to The Week (July 2017) – the main problem with polling these days is that finding representative samples is getting harder… When Gallup was polling, the response rate was 90%, in 2015, ICM had to call up 30 000 numbers just to get 2000 responses. And those who do respond are often too politically engaged to be representative.

 

YouGov Surveys – What the World Thinks?

The YouGov website is a great source for finding examples of social surveys and results from survey data.

Quantitative Data

 

YouGov is company which collects mainly survey data on a wide range of topics from people all over the world, and publishes it’s findings on a daily basis.

On their intro page they say ‘YouGov is a community of 4 million people around the world who share their views…. w’ere pretty sure its the largest daily updated database of people’s habits and opinions in the world’ – in addition to the structured survey data, some people also comment on the findings of said data, so you get a more qualitative feel added into the mix.

The data is very easy to access – for example below are YouGov’s latest findings on attitudes towards the children of illegal immigrants:

attitudes-to-immigration-uk

 

You can see from the above that we are pretty intolerant of illegal immigrants as a nation, which is one of the advantages of survey data.

You can also ‘drill down’ into the data and find correlations between attitudes and politics/ gender/ age and social class. Below we see that older people are less tolerant than younger people:

young-people-attitudes-immigration

The advantages and disadvantages of social surveys 

The big strength of this site is that it’s very accessible – you can very easily get some quick ‘facts’ about what people think about a lot of different topics, and you can easily see the correlations between attitudes and other variables such as class and gender.

The information contained in the site is also good for illustrating the limitations of survey data – you don’t really get any depth or explanation of why people hold these views (not even with the comments, because relatively few people comment).

Finally, I really like the fact that you get to see the specific question asked, so you can always bung a particular question, or set of questions on Socrative to check out the reliability with your students!

Related Posts

The strengths and limitations of social surveys 

Positivism, Sociology and Social Research – Positivists like the survey method

 

Families in the UK – Nine Interesting Statistics

Having an overview of statistics on family life in the UK is a useful starting point for studying families and households.

Nine important stats to know about families and households in the UK in 2022:

  • There are 19.4 million families.
  • There are 28.2 million households.
  • 57% of families are classic nuclear family households with either dependent or adult children living in the same house.
  • 30% of households are single person households.
  • 31% of men who live alone are 65 or over as are 48% of women.
  • 31% of adult males live with parents compared to only 22% of adult females, aged 20-34.
  • The marriage rate has halved between 1991 and 2019.
  • The average age of marriage was 35.4 and 33.2 for men and women respectively in 2020.
  • Single parent families are twice as likely to be in poverty than two parent families.

The rest of this post explores these statistics in more depth. Sources are towards the bottom of the post!

Family types in the UK in 2022

There was a total of 19.4 million families in the UK in 2022, an increase of 1 million since 2012.

bar chart showing family types in the UK IN 2022.
  • There were 12.8 million married couple families in the UK in 2022, representing 66% of all families.
  • There were 3.7 milion opposite-sex cohabiting families, 19% of all families.
  • There were 2.9 million lone parent families, 15% of all families.
  • There were 110, 000 same-sex cohabiting couple families and 110, 000 civil partner couple families (both types around 0.6% of all families).
  • The number of married coupe families and lone parent families have decreased slightly since 2012.
  • Cohabiting and civil-partner families have increased slightly since 2012.

NB: the statistics above only show family households, they don’t include single person households, which make up about 30% of all households in the UK today.

The nuclear family is still the main type of family

  • 11.1 Million households had children living in them, so this means 57% of families are classic nuclear families.
  • 8.2 million of these families had dependent children in them and 2.9 million had only non-dependent children.
  • 8.3 million families had no children living within them.

So for all the talk of the decline in the nuclear family, the statistics suggest the nuclear family is still the predominant family type.

Households types in the UK in 2022

There were 28.2 million households in the UK in 2022. This means the average household size is 2.36 people per household.

bar chart showing household types in the Uk in 2022.
  • One family households are the main households type. There were 18.8 million one family households, 67% of the total.
  • There were 8.3 million single person households in the UK in 2022, 30% of the total.
  • Houses of unrelated adults (house shares) were 3% of the total.
  • Multi-family households made up 1% of the total.

Living Alone: younger men and older women!

Men aged 45-64 are most likely to live alone. Of men who live alone, 34% are aged 45-64.

Of women who live alone, 37% of them are aged 75 or over!

Age group% of those living alone men% of those living alone women
16-243%2%
25-4424%11%
45-6434%27%
65-7419%24%
75+16%37%

Graphics on living alone from the ONS…

bar chart showing ages of men living alone UK 2012 to 2022.
bar chart showing ages of women living alone in the UK in 2022.

The number of adults living with their parents has increased.

The number of adults living with their parents rose by over 14% between 2011 and 2021 to 4.9 million adults.

Young adult males are more likely to live with their parents than young adult females.

In 2022 31% of males aged 20-34 lived with their parents compared to only 22% of females aged 20 to 34. (Source).

The marriage rate almost halved between 1991 and 2019

In 1991 there were just under 40 marriages per 1000 unmarried men. By 2019 this had halved to just under 20 per thousand. The trend is similar for women but not quite as dramatic.

The marriage rate then plunged to around 6/1000 during covid, but it will probably bounce back in coming years!

declining marriage rate in england and wales.

The average age of marriage has increased since

The average (median) age of men marrying in 2020 was 35.4 years and for women this was 33.2 years.

Marriage ages were around 26 for men and 24 for women in the early 20th century, then declined to 22 for men and 21 for women between 1940 and 1970.

From 1970 the average age of first marriage has increased to the mid 30s for both men and women, but it now seems to be levelling out!

Single parent families are twice as likely to be in poverty

poverty rates for single parent compared to dual parent families.

Almost 50% of lone parent families are in relative poverty, double the rate of two parent families, according to the IFS. (NB: Pre-pandemic figures!)

Sources

Families and Households 2022 (Office for National Statistics).

Nine Facts about Marriage (Office for National Statistics).

ONS More Adults Living with their Parents.

ONS Marriages in England and Wales.

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

Is it worth doing a degree?

Is it worth spending £30, 000 or more and three years of your life doing a degree?

If we limit our analysis to purely financial considerations and if we focus on ‘median earnings’ – then yes, on average, it is definitely still worth doing a degree: graduates currently earn about £8K a year more on average than non graduates (graduate labour market statistics 2015)

graduate-earnings

However, the gap between the earnings of graduates and non-gradates is closing – in 2005 graduates earned about 55% more than non graduates, while in 2015 they only earned 45% more.

graduate-earnings-2015

If this trend continues, then a degree will be worthless by 2045, at least if we measure the value of a degree purely in economic terms.

A recent YouGov survey (May 2017) found that only 61% of students felt that their degree was worth the money, so possible this is evidence that what students feel is coming into line with the more objective financial trends above…

Of course there’s a whole load of other factors you need to consider to answer the above question fully! But I wanted to keep this post focused on just one dimension.

Further reading

Wealth and Income inequality in the UK

The richest 10% are 133 times wealthier than the poorest 10%. This post explores statistics on wealth and income inequalities in the UK

The wealthiest 10% of households in the UK are 133 times richer than the poorest 10% of households (1).

The disposable income of the richest 20% of households is 4.5 times greater than the poorest 20% (2).

Wealth Inequalities in the UK


In 2018-2022:

  • The richest 1% of households had a median wealth of more than £3.6 million.
  • The richest 10% of households had a median wealth of £1.9 million.
  • The poorest 10% of households had a median wealth of just  £15,400. 

This means the wealthiest 10% of households were 130 times richer than the poorest 10% of households. The wealthiest  10% were 233 times richer. 

Components of wealth 

As measured by the ONS wealth is made up of four main components:

  • Pensions 
  • Property
  • Other physical assets 
  • Cash savings 

For the wealthiest households, private pensions make up a more significant portion of wealth. Pensions as a proportion of wealth becomes less significant the poorer the household is. 

In middle-wealth households, property is the most significant proportion of wealth. 

This probably means that for the ‘middle wealthy’ they are not as affluent as may appear. Most of these people will live in those households, no income is derived from that portion of their wealth. In contrast, pension wealth, which wealthier households have a lot more of, yields an income.  

Trends in wealth distribution

The wealth of the richest 10% of households has decreased in the very long term. In 1900, the top 10% controlled over 50% of wealth. This declined to a low of 26.5% in 1970, but then increased to 38.7% in 2013. The proportion of wealth controlled by the top 10% has declined slightly over the last decade (3)

In 2021 the top 10% controlled 35.7% of wealth, compared to the bottom 50% who controlled only 20.4% of wealth.

According the Equality Trust, by 2023, the richest 50 families in the UK held more wealth than half of the UK population, comprising 33.5 million people.

Income inequalities in the UK 2022

Median equivalized disposable income for the richest 20% of households was £66002 in 2022, compared to £14508 for the poorest 20% of households (2).

This means the richest 20% of households had an income 4.5 times greater than the poorest 20% of households.

Disposable income is income after taxes and benefits. Equivalized means income is adjusted to take account of household composition because costs are different for single people, couples and families.

Income inequality and poverty

The government’s own measurement of households in poverty is set at 60% of median income, which was £32349 in 2022.

60% of this median income is £19409 which means that every single one of those households in the bottom quintile is in poverty, as are around half of the households in the second quintile.

It should be no surprise based on the above distribution that 13.4 million people or 20% of the population were living in poverty in 2020/2021.

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation also has measures of deep poverty, set at 50% of median income at £16174 a year and very deep poverty, at 40% or just under £13 000 a year.

Poverty has deepened in recent years, with more people falling into deep and very deep poverty. Based on the above distribution for example every household in the bottom quintile is in deep poverty, some will be in very deep poverty!

A more detailed income distribution

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has developed an online calculator where you can enter your income to see where you fit in to the distribution in the UK.

If you enter your income and costs you will show up as a red bar. (My screen capture below doesn’t show a red bar as I entered a fake high income, so my bar is off the scale to the right!).

What the graphic below shows is how many millions of people earn roughly what weekly income. Each bar represents an increase in income of around £7.

I put two arrows in to demonstrate that most people receive between £200 and £550 per week.

You can also see from the above bar chart that there are more people clustered towards the middle-left. Relatively few people have very high incomes!

The different shades of green are just to make the graphic easier to read.

All of the people in the first light shade of green to the left will classify as being in very deep poverty, with incomes of less than £190 a week.

Trends in income inequality

Disposable income inequality has increased considerably since 1977. As measured by the Gini Coefficient, income inequality has increased from 24.5% in 1977 to 34.7% in 2022 (4).

The Gini coefficient takes values between 0% and 100%, with higher values representing an increase in the level of inequality. A value of 0% indicates complete equality, a value of 100% complete inequality. A 100% score would mean one person (or household) has all the income.

Signposting and related posts

Poverty is a concept that is often linked with wealth (you might crudely say that poverty is the opposite of wealth).

Wealth and income inequalities are closely correlated with social class, although economic measurements are just one indicator of social class, which is a broader concept, also encompassing social and cultural capital (if we are going to use the latest social class survey – see here for an introduction to the concept of social class.

Have a look at evaluating the usefulness of official statistics and consider which strengths and limitations apply here.

Sources

(1) Office for National Statistics (ONS), released 2 January 2022, ONS website, Household total wealth in Great Britain: April 2018 to March 2020

(2) Office for National Statistics (ONS), released 25 January 2023, ONS website, statistical bulletin, Household income inequality, UK: financial year ending 2022

(3) The Equality Trust (accessed August 2023) The Scale of Economic Inequality in the UK

(4) Office for National Statistics (ONS), released 25 January 2023, ONS website, statistical bulletin, Household income inequality, UK: financial year ending 2022

Families and Households in the UK – Social Trends

married family households are decreasing, cohabiting family, lone parent family and single parent family households are all increasing.

This post summaries some of the changing trends (and continuities) in family and household structure in the UK, using data from the Office for National Statistics which collects a range of data annually on families and households in the UK.

The Office for National Statistics Families and Households Hub Page is an obvious starting point for exploring this issue . Some of the headline stats include the following:

Families in the UK in 2022…

  • There were 19.4 million families in the UK in 2022.
  • The most common family type in the UK 2022 was the married couple family, making up 65% of all families (down from 67% in 2012).
  • Cohabiting couple families made up 19% of all families, up from 16% in 2012.
  • There were 2.9 million lone parent families in 2022, representing 15% of all families.
  • 43% of families had no children living with them and 42% of families had at least one dependent child.
  • Only 15% of families had only non-dependent children living with them.

Households in the UK in 2022…

percentages of household by household type UK 2019, pie chart.

The breakdown of family and non-family households in the UK in 2022 was as follows…

  • There were 28.2 million households in the UK in 2022, an increase of 1.6 million since 2012.
  • 18.8 million (57%) of households were one family households, either with or without children living in them. Approximately half of these had children living in, the other half were ’empty nest’ households.
  • (10% of households were lone parent family households (84% of which were lone-mother households. NB this 10% is included in the 57% in the first bullet point above!).
  • 8.5 million households (30%) were single person households, up from 29% in 2012 and representing 13% of the population in 2022.
  • 3% of households were occupied by unrelated adults living together
  • 1% of households were multi family, which includes multigenerational.
  • The average household had 2.36 people living in it in 2022, similar to 2012.

Changes to families and households 2012-2022

I’ve used the 2022 statistics where I can to summarise trends, but in some cases below I’ve had to go back to the 2018 analysis because that’s the last time the ONS focussed on changes over time using the particular graphics I wanted. NB the trend between 2018 and 2022 probably hasn’t changed anyway, so no worries!

(With any luck I’ll have the visualisation skills to update this with the 2022 data soon enough anyway!)

Changes to Family Households

  • There has been a continued decrease in married couple families, from 67% of families in 2012 to 65.2% of families in 2022.
  • Opposite-sex cohabiting families have seen the most signficant growth, up from 15.4% to almost 19% of all families today.
  • The number of lone parent families has decreased slightly in the last ten years to 15% of all families in 2022.
  • Same-sex cohabiting and same-sex civil partner families have both increased and together make up 1.2% of all families in 2022, up from 0.8% of all families in 2012
  • This means same-sex families have had the fastest growth rate over the past decade but from a very small base.
bar chart showing changes to family types UK 2012-2022.

Marriage and Cohabitation Trends 

The chart below clearly shows the long term increase in cohabitating families between 1996 to 2018, and when combined with stats above, from 1996 to 2022.

In 1996 there were only 2 million cohabiting families, in 2022 there were 3.7 million.

The number of married families remained stable between 1996 and 2018, but have declined quite sharply in the last four years to 2022.

Family Size in the UK

The one child family is the most common type of family in the UK in 2022.

  • 44% of families are one child, around 3.6 million families
  • 41% are two children families, around 3.4 million families
  • 15% are three children families, around 1.2 million families.
pie chart showing family sizes in the UK in 2022.

Family size appears to have remained pretty stable over the past 15 years (1)

Households Size in the UK

The average household size in the UK is 2.4, but the infographic below taken from the 2021 UK Census (2) shows how this breaks down more specifically. The dots are local authority areas, so the national average is in the middle of each cluster.

  • 30% of households have one person in
  • 35% have two people in
  • 17% have three people in
  • 14% have three people in
  • 5% have five people in.

The above are estimates based on looking at what’s below!

Multi Family Households 

There were approximately 280 000 multi family households in the UK in 2022, which is down from the peak of just over 300 000 in 2014, but a significant long term increase since 1996 when there were only 180 000 such households…

Bar chart showing trends in multi family households UK

Increase in People Living Alone

There has been a slow and steady increase in the overall numbers of people living alone, but this varies a lot by age – generally the number of older people living alone has increased, the number of younger people living alone has decreased.

Signposting and related posts.

This is a key topic in the families and households module, usually taught in the first year of A-level sociology.

An obvious next post to read would be ‘explaining the increase in family diversity‘.

To return to the homepage – revisesociology.com

Sources

(1) Family size in the UK.

(2) UK Census: Household and Resident Characteristics 2021.

Income Inequality in the UK – Some Infographics

Stratification is one of the core themes within A level Sociology and Sociology more generally. One of the major sources of stratification is found in differences between wealth and income within the UK. According to various sources of statistics (of course you should always question where these come from!) the UK is one of the most unequal countries in the developed world, and this is something I like to bang on about a lot. Below are a few handy infographics which illustrate the extent of wealth and income inequality in the UK.

  1. This first infographic from the excellent Equality Trust (authors of The Spirit Level) provides a nice general overview. The headline figure is quite easy to remember – the top o.1% earn about 100 times more than the bottom 90%, and the ratio is roughly the same for the earnings of a CEO of a FTSE 100 company compared to the average UK income.

income inequality UK

2. This infographic from Income Inequality Briefing reminds us that the wages of the richest have increased, while the relative wages of the poorest have decreased in real terms.

 

inequality UK

3. This third infographic, again from the Inequality Briefing, looks at things regionally – Basically I think it tells us that the wealthiest region (London) is twice as wealthy in terms of wages as the poorest (up north somewhere or Welsh valleys). It also reminds us that the UK is one of the most unequal countries in Europe. Basically the average income in London is double the average income in the West Midlands.

regional inequality UK

4. This final infographic from the Office for National Statistics at least reminds us that taxation and benefits do help to reduce income inequality to an extent. Before tax and benefits the richest 20% of households are 14 times richer than the poorest, but after tax and benefits, the ratio reduces 4. NB1 – If you were comparing the richest 10% with the poorest 10% the difference would be larger. NB2 remember that most people who receive benefit are actually in work, and benefits (e.g. housing benefit) tops up their low wages.

tax benefits income inequality

 

Official Statistics on Educational Achievement in the U.K. – Strengths and Limitations

How useful are official statistics for understanding differences in educational achievement by social class, gender and ethnicity?

How do GCSE results vary by social class, gender and ethnicity?

The data below is taken from either the Department for Education’s document – Key Stage 4 performance 2019 (Revised), or Gov.uk ‘ethnicity facts and figures‘. The later shows data from 2017/18 (at time of writing this), but it is much more accessible than the ‘Key Stage 4 document’.

Firstly – GENDER –  Girls outperformed boys in all headline measures in 2019.

For example 46.6% of girls achieved both English and Maths at grade 5 or above, compared to only 40.0% of boys, and girls are much more likley to be entered for the Ebacc than boys (45.9% compared to 34.3%

Secondly – ETHNICITY – Chinese pupils are the highest achieving group. 75.3% of Chinese pupils achieved a ‘strong pass’ (grade 5 or above) in English and Maths, with Indian pupils being the second highest achieving group, at 62%

Black Caribbean pupils have the lowest achievement of any ‘large’ ethnic minority group, with only 26.9% achieving a grade 5 or above in English and Maths

Gypsy/ Roma and Irish Traveller pupils have the lowest levels of achievement with only 9.95 and 5.3% respectively achieving a strong pass in English and Maths.

Thirdly – SOCIAL CLASS – Here, instead of social class we need to use the Department for Education’s ‘disadvantaged pupils’ category, which is the closest we’ve got as a proxy for social class, but isn’t quite the same!

The DFE says that “Pupils are defined as disadvantaged if they are known to have been eligible for free school meals in the past six years , if they are recorded as having been looked after for at least one day or if they are recorded as having been adopted from care”.

In 2019, only 24.7% of disadvantages pupils achieved English and Maths GCSE at grade 5 or above, compared to almost 50% of all other pupils, meaning disadvantaged pupils are only half as likely to get both of these two crucial GCSEs.

Some Strengths of Official Statistics on Educational Achievement by Pupil Characteristic 

ONE – Good Validity (as far as it goes) – These data aren’t collected by the schools themselves – so they’re not a complete work of fiction, they are based on external examinations or coursework which is independently verified, so we should be getting a reasonably true representation of actual achievement levels. HOWEVER, we need to be cautious about this.

TWO – Excellent representativeness – We are getting information on practically every pupil in the country, even the ones who fail!

THREE – They allow for easy comparisons by social class, gender and ethnicity. These data allow us to see some pretty interesting trends – As in the table below – the difference between poor Chinese girls and poor white boys stands out a mile… (so you learn straight away that it’s not just poverty that’s responsible for educational underachievement)

FOUR – These are freely available to anyone with an internet connection

FIVE – They allow the government to track educational achievement and develop social policies to target the groups who are the most likely to underachieve – These data show us (once you look at it all together) for example, that the biggest problem of underachievement is with white, FSM boys.

Some Disadvantages of the Department for Education’s Stats on Educational Achievement

ONE – If you look again at the DFE’s Key Stage four statistics, you’ll probably notice that it’s quite bewildering – there are so many different measurements that it obscures the headline data of ‘who achieved those two crucial GCSEs’.

When it comes to the ‘Attainment 8’ or ‘Progress 8’ scores, it is especially unclear what this means to anyone other than a professional teacher – all you get is a number, which means nothing to non professionals.

TWO – changes to the way results are reported mean it’s difficult to make comparisons over time. If you go back to 2015 then the standard was to achieve 5 good GCSEs in any subject, now the government is just focusing on English and Maths, Ebacc entry and attainment 8.

THREE – These stats don’t actually tell us about the relationship between social class background and educational attainment. Rather than recording data using a sociological conception of social class, the government uses the limited definition of Free School Meal eligibility – which is just an indicator of material deprivation rather than social class in its fuller sense. Marxist sociologists would argue that this is ideological – the government simply isn’t interested in measuring the effects of social class on achievement – and if you don’t measure it the problem kind of disappears.

FOUR – and this is almost certainly the biggest limitation – these stats don’t actually tell us anything about ‘WHY THESE VARIATIONS EXIST’ – Of course they allow us to formulate hypotheses – but (at least if we’re being objective’) we don’t get to see why FSM children are twice as likely to do badly in school… we need to do further research to figure this out.

No doubt there are further strengths and limitations, but this is something for you to be going on with at least…

Related Posts 

Official Statistics in Sociology

Assessing the Usefulness of Using Secondary Qualitative Data to Research Education

Trends in Family and Household Diversity in the UK

The diversity of families and households in the UK has been slowly increasing since 2012. Types of families on the rise include cohabiting households, reconstituted families, single-parent families, and ‘kidult’ households where adults live with their parents. There’s been a slight decrease in traditional ‘cereal packet’ families. Multigenerational households, however, saw a minor decrease, making up only 1% of households in 2022. Single-person households and lone-parent families also increased marginally yet represent significant proportions of UK households.

Families and households in the UK have become more diverse since 2012, although the rate of change is relatively slow paced. The types of family and households which have increased since the 1950s include:

  • cohabiting rather than married households
  • reconstituted or step families
  • lone parent families
  • single person households
  • Kidult households, where adult children live with their parents.

The statistics below focus more on the trends in the last decade.

A slight decrease in ‘cereal packet’ families

  • The proportion of opposite-sex non-married cohabiting family households increased in the last decades, from 15.7% of all family households in the UK to 18.4% of all households in the UK.
  • There was a corresponding decrease in opposite-sex married family households: from 67% of all households to 65.2% of all households (2).
bar chart showing slight decrease in married family households
The proportion of ‘cereal packet families’ is slowly declining.
  • An important analysis point here is that the rate of decline is not particularly fast or significant.
  • Opposite-sex married and cohabitating families together make up 81% of all family households.
  • In other words around 80% of households with children are still heterosexual two parent households!

Trends in Reconstituted Families

  • In 2011 there were 544,000 step families with dependent children in England and Wales.
  • This means that 11% of couple families with dependent children were step families.
  • The Number of step families has increased since the 1950s.
  • However, the number of step families has declined recently dropping from 631,000 in 2001 to just 544,000 in 2011.
  • If there is only one biological parent in the step-family, that parent is the mother rather than the father in 90% of cases.
  • NB it is more difficult to get up to date stats on step-families! However according to this Guardian article from 2021 an estimated 1 in 3 families are blended families. NB this is probably including families with non dependent children.

Trends in Lone Parent Households

  • There were 2.9 million lone-parent families in the UK in 2022, which is 15% of all families.
  • This is down slightly from 2012 when there were 3.0 million lone-parent families, representing 17% of all families
  • 84% of lone-parent families were lone-mother families in 2022.
  • See source (2) below.

Separated Families

  • A separated family is defined as ‘one parent with care of a child 16 or under, or child aged under 20 if they are in full time Further Education, and with a non-resident parent’.
  • In 2020 there were an estimated 2.3 million separated families in Britain, with an estimated 3.6 million children.
  • 89% of parents with care in 2020 were female and under the age 50, and 86% of the non-resident parents male and 80% were under 50.
  • Methodological note: Lone parent and separated families are not quite. the same thing!

Trends in Single Person Households

  • 29.6% of all households in the UK were single person households in 2022.
  • This is equivalent to 8.3 million people or 13% of people who live in households.
  • This is up slightly from 2012 when 29% of all households were single person households.
  • According to Euromonitor International, the number of people living alone globally is skyrocketing, rising from about 153 million in 1996 to 277 million in 2011 – an increase of around 80% in 15 years.

Trends in ‘Kidult’ Households

The number of adults living with their parents rose by over 14% between 2011 and 2021 to 4.9 million adults.

Young adult males are more likely to live with their parents than young adult females.

In 2022 31% of males aged 20-34 lived with their parents compared to only 22% of females aged 20 to 34. (Source).

bar chart showing number of adults living with their parents UK

Overall, around 1/3 of adult men and 1/5th of adult women in the UK now live with their parents.

Trends in Multigenerational Households

  • Only 1% of households were multigenerational in the UK in 2022.
  • This is down slightly from 2012 when the figure was 1.1%.
Signposting and related posts

You can find a fuller range of stats in this post: Families in the UK: Interesting Statistics!

The next logical post after this one is:Explaining the increase in family diversity – part 1 of 3

For more posts on this topic area more generally please see my page on families and households, one of the options within the first year of A-level sociology (AAQA).

Sources

(1) Gov.UK (accessed June 2023) Separated Families Statistics April 2014 to March 2020.

(2) ONS: Families and Households in the UK 2022 (accessed June 2023)