Introduction
Which young people leave home and when? No publically available survey has been designed specifically to answer this question, but, with a little ingenuity, a picture can be coaxed from the General Household Survey (GHS). The GHS defines a household as one or more persons occupying a single dwelling, all of whom must have been present for at least four nights in the week preceding the Survey, and this must be the core of our concept of ‘home’ [1]. Households are now quite small in South Africa. The 2015 GHS found 53 762 570 people in 16 121 989 households, an average of 3.33 persons per household.
But what kind of home might a young person leave? Answering this question uses the following information in the GHS:
The operating definition is that a young person is staying at home if they satisfy at least one of the following conditions:
All other young people are regarded as having left home.
The rationale for the operating definition has several components.
Table 1 - Grandchildren and great grandchildren
Category |
Number |
|||
Father and mother lost |
445 923 |
|||
Father or mother in household |
311 269 |
|||
Father or mother known to |
||||
be alive but living elsewhere |
1 443 854 |
|||
Total |
2 201 046 |
Note: The term ‘lost’ refers to parents who are either dead, or who are not known to be either dead or alive.
Young people in the first category are effectively orphaned and young people in the second category are members of a multi-generation household. Young people in the third category are being looked after by grandparents or great grandparents while either their fathers or their mothers are living elsewhere. It is clear that young people in the second category are stayers. Young people in the first and third categories may have lived with one or both of their parents before joining households headed by their grandparents or great grandparents, but the convention adopted here is to regard them as stayers as well.
Does this classification of young people into leavers and stayers work? Figure 1 suggests that it does a reasonable job. The proportion of the age group which have left home rises with age, from about 3.5% at age 15 to 70% at age 34. The curves for men and women are essentially the same up to age 24, after which the proportion of women who have left is slightly greater than the proportion of men.
The implication is that the number of youth stayers is greater than the number of youth leavers for the 15-34 age group, as Table 1 indicates. Of the just under 20 million young people, as estimated by GHS 2015, roughly five-eighths are still at home.
Table 2 sets out the results by the relationship of each person to the household head. Nearly all the household heads and their partners are leavers, but a few are still in households with parents present. By assumption, all children and grandchildren of household heads are regarded as stayers. Just over half the brothers and sisters and just under half of other relatives are leavers.
Table 3 sets out stayers and leavers by gender. As Figure 1 indicates and Table 3 confirms, the differences between young men and young women are not great, with a slightly greater proportion of young women leaving home. The age at which leavers first outnumber stayers is 27.
Table 2 - Stayers and leavers by relationship category
Stayers |
Leavers |
Total |
||
Household head |
1,7% |
98,3% |
100,0% |
|
Partner of head |
6,9% |
93,1% |
100,0% |
|
Son/daughter |
100,0% |
100,0% |
||
Brother/sister |
42,8% |
57,2% |
100,0% |
|
Grandchild |
100,0% |
100,0% |
||
Other relative |
55,7% |
44,3% |
100,0% |
|
Non related person |
6,0% |
94,0% |
100,0% |
|
Unknown |
100,0% |
100,0% |
Table 3 - Stayers and leavers by gender
Stayers |
Leavers |
Total |
||
Male |
63,7% |
36,3% |
100,0% |
|
Female |
61,9% |
38,1% |
100,0% |
|
All |
62,8% |
37,2% |
100,0% |
Conclusion
The indicator of whether young people are staying at home or have left is approximate, but it yields plausible results. The next brief will consider possible reasons why some young people leave home and why they stay, and analyse their effects.
Charles Simkins
Head of Research
charles@hsf.org.za
[1] An analysis of the ‘extended family’ stretching over more than one household will have to await a different data set
[2] There are few young people in relationship categories 5 and 6, and a look at their ages suggests that the enumerators specified the relationship the wrong way round (i.e. relationship of household head to person). Accordingly, those in relationship category 5 are reassigned to relationship category 3 and those in category 6 are reassigned to category 7.