Technical characteristics of the statistical populations and of the observation units
Article 3
1. The observation units shall be private households or private household members. 2. Where a person regularly lives in more than one dwelling, the dwelling where that person spends the greater part of the year shall be taken to be his or her place of usual residence, regardless of whether it is located elsewhere within the country or abroad. 3. In applying the statistical concept of usual residence the particular cases shall be treated as provided for in Article 4. 4. Persons living as usual residents in hotels shall, in principle, be excluded from the private household population. However, they may be considered as belonging to that population if that is how their situation is defined in their country of residence, in which case it shall be clearly described in the quality report referred to in Regulation (EU) 2019/1700. 5. Private households may exclude persons whose need for shelter and subsistence is met by an institution and who, on the reference date (as defined for a specific data collection), have spent, or are likely to spend, 12 months or more living there. 6. Persons performing compulsory military service (conscripts) are included in the private household population if their service lasts less than 12 months or if they spend significant amounts of time in the family home and are dependent on their parents, legal guardians, or other family members while performing compulsory military service. By derogation, for the purposes of data collection in the labour force domain, all conscripts shall be excluded from the private household population. 7. All people who are usually resident, irrespective of whether or not they are related to other members of the private household, shall be considered to be members of a multi-person private household if they share household income or household expenses with other household members. Flatmates or housemates occupying a housing unit on a house-sharing basis and sharing only house-related expenses, but not sharing household income, shall not be considered a part of a multi-person private household occupying this housing unit, even if they share some other subsidiary household expenses. 8. Where it is not feasible to establish whether the criteria for one-person or multi-person private households are met, the interviewee’s views on his or her situation vis-à-vis the other persons residing in the dwelling shall be taken into consideration. 9. Where multiple private households exist within a single dwelling, Member States shall aim to record data for all the households within a given dwelling. 10. Member States shall make every effort to avoid recording the same persons twice.