The Household in Flux

Abstract

The household is a ubiquitous unit of analysis across the social sciences. In policy, research and practice, households are often considered a link between individuals and the structures that they interact with on a daily basis. Yet, researchers often take the household for granted as something that means the same thing to everyone across contexts. As the household has never truly been a static unit of analysis, we need to revisit the household to ensure that we are still capturing what it means to be part of a household – especially if we are engaging in research where we aim to compare households across time and space. We analyse how the concept of the household has been used over time and identify areas, such as migration and urbanisation, where we need to ensure conceptual clarity. We use our field notes and ethnographic interviews to show the challenges of such an analysis.

Precarious hope and reframing risk behavior from the ground up: insight from ethnographic research with Rwandan urban refugees in Yaoundé, Cameroon

“…Our evidence underlines the importance in exploring what is hidden in the household and needs to be understood and uncovered in order to ensure that the well-being of all household members is supported through social services. These household dynamics, often times gendered, can then be brought to focus for effective policy and social service programs that ensure the well-being of all household members [83]. Our framework of precarious hope offers a solution in underlining the need to pay attention to these often gendered household dynamics and the differential effects of changing social service frameworks and humanitarian policy on household members.…”

Radical Householding towards a Post‐Capitalist World in Kin Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles: A Family, 2029‐2047

“…Anthropological writings on the household have pushed back on this easy isomorphism between families and households by showing how families are usually more dispersed than a localized focus on household captures (Guyer 1986, Carsten 2003) and that households incorporate many non‐kin others in activities that go beyond consumption to include the production of things and persons (Goody 1976, Meillassoux 1983, Kabeer 1994, Narotzky 1997). Concepts such as “livelihood,” “government of the house,” and “provisioning” have evolved to draw attention to the myriad activities of people living together that better show how the categories of consumption and production are informed by power relations and integrated with the market and the state (see Kabeer 1994, Mintz 1996, Narotzky 2012a, Yotebieng and Forcone 2018, de L’Estoile and Neiburg 2020). Cautioned by this scholarship, I am not interested in whether households have an intrinsic reality or definitional sharpness to allow for secure cross‐comparisons.…”

Data-driven versus traditional definitions of household membership and household composition: does latent class analysis produce meaningful groupings?

“…The literature around how to describe and define household groupings in a meaningful way has a long history across several disciplines including anthropology and demography (see Yotebieng and Forcone 2018 for a comprehensive summary). It has long been recognised that household composition should be studied in culturally sensitive ways (Yanagisako 1979), and a range of methods have been used to improve household definitions in specific contexts, for example, some studies do use definitions based on ethnographic information or qualitative research (e.g.…”