7. Annex A: Glossary

A census family refers to a married couple with or without children, a common-law couple with or without children, and a one-parent family with at least one child living in the same dwelling. For more information on census families, please consult: Census family.

An economic family refers to a group of two or more people who live in the same dwelling and are related by blood, marriage, common-law union, adoption or foster relationship. The concept of an economic family is broad and can include, for example, siblings who live together but are not members of a census family. By definition, all census families are members of an economic family. All economic family types, including persons not part of an economic family, used in this report exclude elderly persons over the age of 65. This concept is used mostly in the section on Sources of Income. For more information on census, please consult: Economic family.

A lone-parent family is defined as a family with only parent with at least one child.

A couple family consists of a married or common-law couple living together at the same address with or without children. In the report, when looking at economic families, only couple families with children are included. For analyses involving census families, couple families with or without families are generally used in comparison with lone-parent families. It is important to note that couple families without children account for a significant proportion of couples with or without children, representing 51% of couple families in 2021; see Statistics Canada, n.d.-a. Where possible and relevant, analyses may look at census couple families with one child, two children and three or more children.

Persons not in an economic or census family refer to all persons who do not live in an economic or census family, such as persons living alone.

For more information on census families and economic families, please consult: Census family and Economic family.

Households is a broad concept, referring to any persons who live in the same dwelling. This can include a census family, two census families sharing a dwelling, or a group of roommates. The report uses the concept of households when presenting data on racialized and non-racialized immigrant lone-parent families; however, the data source focuses on one-census-family households, meaning that they are census families with no other persons present in the household. For more information on households, see Household.

The median is the midpoint, half the population have an income above the median and the other half below it. Statistics Canada calculates the median income by excluding zero values for individuals and publishes data on median income rounded to the nearest ten dollars. Throughout the report, median income and median government transfers are used as comparative measures of the economic well-being of lone-parent families, particularly in relation to couple families.