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In the Yoruba kingdom of Ondo,2 households are conceptualized as special social units, and they form distinct social groupings. In contrast, families are given only a limited recognition, at best and they form distinct social groups only in limited contexts. Comparable situations are readily found in the ethnographic literature.

The concepts of "household" and "family" have been given a greater degree of precision in recent years by those scholars who have pointed out that the former is a residence group that carries out domestic functions while the latter is a kinship group. The concept of "household," having been analytically distinguished from that of "family," is still burdened by the inclusion of two social phenomena that are logically distinct and vary somewhat independently: co‐residence and domestic functions. Social groups based on affinal and consanguineal relationships, co‐residence, and domestic functions—often thought of as aspects of a single social phenomenon labeled by the term "family"—are in fact semi‐independent variables.