One of the key features of the pathways approach is that it puts the household at the centre of the analysis of housing. Insight into the attitudes and meanings held by households about their housing circumstances and their influence on their behaviour is crucial to an understanding of the housing field and is an important element of the search for identity. However, some problems with adoption of the household as the basic building block have already been alluded to in Chapter One. There are difficulties in defining a household precisely, especially as households continuously form, split and re-form. Nevertheless, people consume housing as households and so it is important to examine how the household functions. One criticism of much housing research (and policy) is that it has stopped at the front door, treating the household like a black box that responds in predictable ways to external stimuli. The difficulty is that, in practice, the responses are not always predictable and vary considerably between households. Therefore, it is necessary to go beyond the front door and attempt to understand how different households understand the world and why they act as they do.

The constant making and remaking of households is a problem, but it is also a process that is crucial to the housing field. For example, the rate at which households form and dissolve is an important determinant of the demand or need for housing. Changes in the size and structure of households can also influence the number, size and type of housing required. Understanding these processes is therefore essential to successful planning by governments and housing developers.

This chapter starts with a discussion of the difficulties involved in settling on a useful definition of a household. The concept of a household is compared with that of a family, and the relationship between the two is explored. The pattern of households is changing in the context of changing family structures. Contact between family members is diminishing and changing in form, but the evidence is that the family is an important element of many people's lives. The changes are influenced by competing discourses of ‘family’ that are present in political discourse and frame public policy as well as the decisions of people in their everyday lives.