Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface to the first impression
- Preface to the second impression
- 1 Introduction: The history of the family
- 2 Some demographic determinants of average household size: An analytic approach
- 3 The evolution of the family
- ENGLAND
- 4 Mean household size in England since the sixteenth century
- 5 Mean household size in England from printed sources
- 6 A note on the household structure of mid-nineteenth-century York in comparative perspective
- 7 Household structure and the industrial revolution; mid-nineteenth-century Preston in comparative perspective
- WESTERN EUROPE
- SERBIA
- JAPAN
- NORTH AMERICA
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Mean household size in England since the sixteenth century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of contributors
- Preface to the first impression
- Preface to the second impression
- 1 Introduction: The history of the family
- 2 Some demographic determinants of average household size: An analytic approach
- 3 The evolution of the family
- ENGLAND
- 4 Mean household size in England since the sixteenth century
- 5 Mean household size in England from printed sources
- 6 A note on the household structure of mid-nineteenth-century York in comparative perspective
- 7 Household structure and the industrial revolution; mid-nineteenth-century Preston in comparative perspective
- WESTERN EUROPE
- SERBIA
- JAPAN
- NORTH AMERICA
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Our interest in this chapter is directed towards one particular subject, the size of the domestic group in England, or England and Wales, from the late sixteenth to the late twentieth century. This is the period of time which separates the era of industrialisation, now perhaps of high industrialisation, from the era of traditional society. Accordingly we begin by discussing mean household size itself, since this ratio has been of considerable significance for social scientists, in spite of the marked limitations in its usefulness which have now begun to be manifest. For the demographer, and especially the historical demographer, it has been employed as a multiplier for calculating total populations from known numbers of domestic groups, generally named and assumed to be households. The anthropologists and sociologists have tended to treat it as a preliminary indicator of household structure. Where mean household size is large they have presumed that the presence in the society of the extended family was probable, and when small that the domestic groups consisted exclusively or for the most part of the simple, nuclear or primary family household of man, wife and children.
It is tempting to extend the demographic argument and to proceed from household size, or more often from changes in mean household size over time, to demographic experience.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Household and Family in Past Times , pp. 125 - 158Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1972
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