Australian Bureau of Statistics
Celebrating the International Year of Statistics 2013

Note: 23 April 2007

The Family Composition Standard has been updated to remove ambiguity and to establish the precedence for coding 'other family' when another family already exists in the household. An 'other family' can only be formed by people who are not related to any couple family or one parent family already present in the household. For further information, see the following updated sections: Underlying Concepts, Classification & Coding, Output, and Appendix A of Household Composition. The 'Glossary', and 'Definition of common concepts' have also been amended to assist users understanding of the specific meaning of terms when used in the ABS context.

ABS Family, Household and Income Unit Variables provide an accurate statistical picture of the structures of families in society, so that debates related to social policy and social support can draw on objective evidence about families, taken from a range of statistical sources. The standards aim to achieve this by providing standard definitions of concepts, methods of data collection, derivation procedures and output formats, for use in all relevant ABS and external statistical collections. The standards are underpinned by a consistently defined concept of the family.