The trend of Vietnamese household size in recent years Nguyen, Thanh Binh 1 Free University of Berlin, Germany Abstract. Along with the country’s socio-economic development, Vietnamese families have undergone considerable changes. These changes can be clearly seen in the obvious decline in household size. This success is attributed to Vietnam’s population and family planning policy and the change in model of multi- generation living together which has existed for thousands of years now. Nonetheless, the reduction in household size is also due to such negative factors as the increasing divorce rate of couples or the trend that a part of the population, especially young people do not want to get married or give birth in order to enjoy their own life. Across the country, single household account for a very low proportion. Small household size (households with 4 members or fewer) is common in our country, especially in urban areas. Generally, rural household size is larger than urban one throughout the country. In terms of geographic regions, the Central Highlands has the largest household size; the second is the Northern Midlands and Mountainous areas. The Red River Delta is the region with the smallest household size. Household size is inversely proportional to incomes of household. Household with the highest incomes (quintile 1) has the smallest size; in contrast, the poorest household (quintile 5) has the largest one. If the correlation between household size and genders of household heads is considered, female-headed households are smaller than male-headed households. Keywords: Household, family, Vietnam. 1. Introduction Household size indicates how big a family is - it is a unit of measurement used to show the number of members living in a family, consisting of parents, children and others. Household size depends on couples’ birth rate and model of different generations living together in a family. In traditional agricultural society, a big number of offspring is a symbol of a happy family, having many children means lots of fortune. As a result, in the early last century, when analyzing Vietnam’s traditional society, Gourou wrote: “…it is certain that Vietnamese women give birth to as many children as they can. Getting married early, often before 20, they continuously give birth until menopause period” (Gourou, 2003:175). In this society, due to the lack of developed science and technology, a big amount of manual labor was needed. This led to a high birth rate and big household size. Also, many generations lived under the same roof. Whereas in the process of industrialization in recent years Vietnam, the birth rate is low and grown up children do not live with their parents, so the household size is smaller. This article tries to answer the following questions: what is the trend of Vietnamese household size now? And which characteristics does it have? 2. Results 2.1. Vietnamese household size tends to shrink According to the 2009 Vietnam population and housing census conducted on April 1 st 2009, Vietnam had 22,628 thousand households, increasing by 5967 households compared with 1999, up 36%. During the period of 1999 - 2009, the annual average growth rate of household number was 3%. Nevertheless, when Vietnamese household size is taken into consideration, we could realize that household size of Vietnam decreased from 5.22 persons per household in 1979 to 4.48 persons per household in 1989, 4.61 persons per 1 Corresponding author. Tel.: +49 15 777565689 E-mail address: binh1980gdct@yahoo.com.vn 47 2011 International Conference on Humanities, Society and Culture IPEDR Vol.20 (2011) © (2011) IACSIT Press, Singapore