The household is a ubiquitous unit of analysis across the social sciences. In policy, research and practice, households are o en considered a link between individuals and the structures that they interact with on a daily basis. Yet, researchers o en take the household for granted as something that means the same thing to everyone across contexts. As the household has never truly been a static unit of analysis, we need to revisit the household to ensure that we are still capturing what it means to be part of a household – especially if we are engaging in research where we aim to compare households across time and space. We analyse how the concept of the household has been used over time and identify areas, such as migration and urbanisation, where we need to ensure conceptual clarity. We use our fi eld notes and ethnographic interviews to show the challenges of such an analysis.

中文翻译：

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助焊剂中的家庭

家庭是整个社会科学中无处不在的分析单位。在政策，研究和实践中，家庭通常被认为是个人与其日常互动的结构之间的联系。但是，研究人员认为将家庭视为理所当然的事情，对于每个情境的每个人来说都是一样的意思。由于家庭从未真正成为静态的分析单位，因此我们需要重新审视家庭，以确保我们仍在了解成为家庭一部分的意义–尤其是当我们从事旨在比较各个家庭的研究时时间和空间。我们分析了一段时间以来如何使用家庭概念，并确定了需要确保概念清晰的区域，例如移民和城市化。