Inside British households : a simulation perspective

Spicer, Keith Adrian (1992) Inside British households : a simulation perspective. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Abstract

Although methods of population projection are more plentiful and documented more fully than those of household projection, there is no doubt that the future number and type of households are as useful. However, analytic methods for projecting households prove to be far more involved and a review is given here. To consider all of the possible demographic events: birth, death, marriage, divorce, leaving home, cohabitation and separation, would entail such an enormous and complicated method that a reliable analytic solution for households by numbers and types would be almost impossible to evaluate. Microsimulation is a useful tool to use in attempting to model future household structure since we can study households at the micro-level. We take ten samples (each of 1000 households) from the 1971 General Household Survey and age them through to 1981, 1991 and 2001 using vital registration data, where available, and other survey data for unregistered events, such as cohabitation and separation. A `Plausible' model is set up for the 1991-2001 period to project the numbes of households by type. It incorporates a sensitivity analysis to test the robustness of the simulation and, moreover, to see the effects of changes in demographic behaviour on the British household distribution in the 1990s up to 2001. The final chapters give the `Most Likely' household composition for 2001 with high and low variants for each type and a short discussion of the following twenty years.

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