Week 12 — Homes, Families, and Later Weddings: Reading the 1975 and 2025 Household Figures — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 11 of the term — read the Census Bureau's household figures for 1975 and 2025, work out what they say, and explain to someone outside sociology why fewer married-couple households is not the same as fewer families.

This week you learned how a society defines a family and kinship, how family forms and marriage patterns vary, how the three perspectives read the family, how the Census Bureau separates a household from a family, and how two views read the same trend as decline or as change. In Week 2 you learned to read any statistic four ways and to keep percentage points separate from percent; this week you use those habits on fifty years of household change. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain a finding to someone who has never studied sociology. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Sociology in Action Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

You will use these figures, all from this week's chapter, plus one illustrative scenario:

• The Census Bureau's 2025 Families and Living Arrangements release: married-couple households were 47% of U.S. households in 2025, against 66% in 1975. One-person households were 29% of households in 2025, which was 39.7 million households, against 20% in 1975. The shares are shares of households, not of people.
• The same release: the median age at first marriage was 30.8 for men and 28.4 for women in 2025, against 23.5 and 21.1 in 1975.
• An illustrative apartment complex (invented for this assignment): it holds 80 households, of which 22 are one person living alone and 10 are unrelated roommates sharing a unit; every other household is people living with at least one relative.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

1. Married-couple households were 66% of U.S. households in 1975 and 47% in 2025. By how many percentage points did the share fall?
2. The median age at first marriage for men was 23.5 in 1975 and 30.8 in 2025. By how many years did it rise?
3. One-person households were 20% of U.S. households in 1975 and 29% in 2025. By what percent did that share grow, measured against its 1975 level?
4. An illustrative apartment complex holds 80 households; 22 are one person living alone and 10 are unrelated roommates sharing a unit. How many of its households are family households?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation of what that value shows and one limit of it. For problem 1, say what the share counts and whom it describes, and explain why the drop does not mean there are fewer families. For problem 2, say what a median age at first marriage measures, explain why a later median does not show that people no longer marry, and say whether the figure shows a correlation, a cause, or neither. For problem 3, explain the difference between the 9-point change and the percent you found, and say what the rise cannot tell you about why more people live alone. For problem 4, use the Census Bureau's definitions to explain why the one-person and roommate households are households but not families, and why a family household need not hold a married couple.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your aunt has never studied sociology and reads a headline: "The American family is disappearing: fewer than half of homes are married couples." She lives alone since her children moved out, and asks whether that makes her part of the problem. Write a 3–5 sentence message to your aunt that explains in everyday words the difference between a household and a family, says what the 47% figure counts and what it does not, mentions that people are marrying later rather than not at all, notes that sociologists read the same trend as decline or as change, and names one limit of the figures. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one accurate message can be defensible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a friend who hears that a town library issued fewer library cards this year and asks whether people in the town have stopped reading. Model answer: "Not necessarily. A library card count tells you how many people signed up at that library, not how many people read. Some readers may borrow e-books on a phone app, share one card in a household, or buy books instead. The limit is that the count cannot tell you why sign-ups fell, only that they did."

Use that pattern for your message to your aunt, with your own explanation and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single data-reading report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and a brief interpretation of what that value shows and one limit of it;
• your message to your aunt, explaining household versus family in everyday words, saying what the 47% figure counts and does not, saying that people marry later rather than not at all, noting the decline and change readings, and naming one limit; and
• a one-line restatement of the values you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled diagram of the household figures with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's numbers, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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