moving to another city or another country may decide to look for a shared house or apartment to avoid loneliness. Social changes such as the declining affordability of home ownership and decreasing marriage rates are reasons why people may choose to live with roommates. Despite this rise, shared housing is little researched. Roommates are a fairly common point of reference in Western culture. In the United States, most young adults spend at least a short part of their lives living with roommates after they leave their family's home. Very often this involves moving out of the home and to college, where the primary option for living is with a roommate. Therefore, many novels, movies, plays, and television programs employ roommates as a basic principle or a plot device (such as the popular series Friends or The Big Bang Theory). Sharing a house or a flat is also very common in European countries such as France (French colocation, corenting) or Germany (German WG for Wohngemeinschaft, living [together] community). Many websites are specialized in finding a flatmate. On the other hand, it is less common for people of any age to live with roommates in some countries, such as Japan, where single-person one-room apartments are plentiful. There are many different forms of flat shares also, from the more established flat shares where the flatmate will get their own room that is furnished to "couch surfing" where people lend their sofa for a short period. Sharehome residents are typically unrelated to each other in that they generally come from different families, although they may be composed of some siblings and sometimes single parents and their children. Perhaps because of the social cohesion required for their formation, sharehomes will often be composed of members of the same peer group. For example, university students who have relocated to a new area to commence a course of study often need to form a sharehome. Share housing often occurs in the 18–35 age bracket – during a life stage between leaving home and having children. Sharehome residents may have pre-existing friendships or other interpersonal relationships or they may form new relationships whilst living together. Many universities in the United States require first-year students to live in on-campus residence halls, sharing a dormitory room with a same-sex roommate. Popularity According to the American Community Survey, 7.7% of Americans lived with a roommate in 2014. From 2000 to 2014,