household

views updated

household A group of persons sharing a home or living space, who aggregate and share their incomes, as evidenced by the fact that they regularly take meals together—the ‘common cooking-pot’ definition. Most households consist of one person living alone, a nuclear family, an extended family, or a group of unrelated people. The definition is sometimes varied so as to exclude, or include, households of non-related people who may set very variable limits, in practice, to the extent of their income-sharing or common expenditure.

More From encyclopedia.com