The two villages are remarkably similar. For Sakaltutan, both the median and the average number of persons per household coincide at six. For Elbashï, there is no clear median, households of four, five and six being roughly equal in numbers, and the average is 5.6. Proportionately, there are fewer large households, only ten per cent of the population living in households of ten or over as against seventeen per cent in Sakaltutan. In both villages, most people live in households with populations of between four and nine - seventy-six per cent in Sakaltutan, eighty-two per cent in Elbashï.
The distribution by household types is also remarkably similar in the two villages. Only two per cent of people live in fragmentary households. Roughly one-quarter of the households are joint and roughly one-third of the people live in joint and two-thirds in simple households.
At first sight, since joint households are clearly stated by everyone to be the ideal, the proportion of people living in them appears remarkably small. The apparent inconsistency is not due to non-conformist behaviour. The cases of premature separation, that is, of sons leaving the paternal home and setting up independent households, are more or less balanced by the number of delayed separations, that is, fraternal joint households. Only three heads of households in Elbashï, and eight in Sakaltutan were sons separated from living fathers, and if all had returned home, the number of joint households would have increased by only one in each village.
Joint household - one with more than one married couple.
Fragmentary household - one without a married couple (p. 36).
2. These include married couples in which the husband is not the true son of the household head, e.g. son-in-law, or a kinsman informally adopted. In some cases, the offspring are not strictly grandchildren.