The Department of Statistics (STAT) has released preliminary results of the Census 2011. During the 2011 Census, which was conducted in April of that year, enumerators went house to house and interviewed the population of St. Maarten. Questions that were asked related to the household (composition, building material, language spoken, amenities available, nuisances experienced) and personal characteristics such as demography and migration, health, fertility, education, labour and income.
The data entry process has now been completed and STAT is in the process of verifying and analysing the data. For this reason, the preliminary results are only reported relatively (as a percentage). However, STAT can already release some of the basic results such as the household characteristics, country of birth, nationalities, illnesses, insurance coverage, gender and age.
Household characteristics
The data shows that 63% of households include members that are related to each other while nearly 30% of the population lives alone. The second and third most popular compositions are households consisting of married couple with children (19%) and single mothers with one or more children (13.18%). A notable statistic is that single parent households compose 15% of the population.
An average household has 2.6 members. This is not significantly different from 2001.