Definition: De facto marital status

Category: Population censuses - UNECE

Marital status of each individual in terms of his or her actual living arrangements within the household enumerated (Source: United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN-ECE) (in cooperation with Eurostat), "Conference of European Statisticians Recommendations for the 2010 Censuses of Population and Housing", New York and Geneva, 2006)

De facto marital status is defined as the marital status of each individual in terms of his or her actual living arrangements.

A similar definition is also used in the final report of the Eurostat Task Force on core social variables:

De facto marital status is defined as the marital status of each individual in terms of his or her actual living arrangements within the household.

De facto marital status is used for identifying persons living in consensual union. Two persons are taken to be partners in a consensual union when they have usual residence in the same household, are not married to each other, and have a marriage-like relationship to each other.

Information on de facto marital status can be derived from information collected on household and family characteristics of persons, characteristics of family nuclei and characteristics of private households, based on the relationship to the reference person question or the full household relationship matrix.

Marital status with other demographic variables, like sex and age, is often used to classify and to base other information collected by census or survey to help in the understanding of various issues.
(Source: United Nations Statistical Commission and Economic Commission for Europe, “Recommendations for the 2000 censuses of population and housing in the ECE region”, Statistical Standards and Studies, New York and Geneva, 1998) http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/ramon/statmanuals/files/Recomm_estat_2010_EN.pdf Recommendations for the 2000 censuses of population and housing in the ECE region (1998)Final report of the Task Force on core social variables