Research on residential mobility has focused on moving rather than staying, and as a consequence, we have a much poorer understanding of why people stay in contrast to why people move. But in fact staying is the usual practice and moving is a relatively rare event. We draw on previous work on staying and the notions of place attachment, that is being invested in a place, owning a house and having connections in the neighbourhood, to investigate the underlying dimensions of the decision to stay. We utilise a retrospective survey data set from Granada (Spain) to model, first, the decision to stay in the house versus moving and, second, the decision to move but stay in the neighbourhood versus moving outside the neighbourhood. The logit models show that family in the neighbourhood, interaction with the neighbours -local connection (using the facilities of the neighbourhood) and a measure of satisfaction with the neighbourhood provide a contextual understanding of why people stay, and who is likely to stay. The models provide data on the different meanings and ways of staying. Neighbourhood variables are crucial to explain the moves inside the same area, well beyond the personal and household characteristics included in most residential mobility models. As we would expect in the Spanish context, family plays an important role in attachment.

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This is the author's Post-print version (final draft post-refereeing as accepted for publication by the journal). The definitive, peer-reviewed and edited version of this article is published as: Palomares-Linares I. & van Ham M. (forthcoming) Understanding the effects of homeownership and regional unemployment levels on internal migration during the economic crisis in Spain. Regional Studies. DOI:

Migration is often viewed as a way to enhance occupational careers. However, particularly in Mediterranean countries, labour market outcomes may also depend on local family resources. We investigate how men’s and women’s labour market outcomes differ between (1) those who migrated and those who did not; and (2) those who live close to family and those who live farther away. Our main contributions are the investigation of the association between migration and labour market outcomes in a different context than the more commonly studied Northern and Western European countries and the United States, and of the role of living close to family in labour market outcomes. We used a sample of labour market participants from the “Attitudes and Expectations About Mobility” survey, conducted in Spain in 2019. Our results show that the likelihood of being a professional is greater for women who migrated than for those who did not, and that the likelihood of being unemployed or in a temporary job is lower for women who live close to family than for those who do not, but neither association was found for men. The finding for living close to family is in line with the notion that nearby family may protect women in particular from precarious labour market positions. The finding for migration differs from previous findings for Northern and Western Europe and the United States, which indicate that migration is beneficial to men in particular. This difference might be specific to a low-migration context, but data limitations prevent firm conclusions.

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Pese a que la familia es una reconocida institución con influencia en múltiples facetas de la vida social en España, no existen muchos estudios específicos sobre su papel en las trayectorias residenciales. Utilizando una encuesta realizada en el área metropolitana de Granada en 2008, en este trabajo analizamos la influencia de dos aspectos —la concentración de la red familiar y la presencia de raíces en el barrio— en las decisiones de movilidad e inmovilidad espacial. Los resultados indican que las redes familiares juegan un papel importante para entender las decisiones de sedentarismo espacial en nuestro contexto de estudio. La familia es un fuerte factor de arraigo en la vivienda y en el barrio de toda la población, pero, al mismo tiempo, está modulado por la posición social de los individuos y las familias y su importancia es mayor entre las familias con menores recursos y para aquellos que residen en barrios más desfavorecidos.

The internal migration literature has identified various factors that deter migration and encourage staying, but has been less concerned with people’s own reports about what makes it difficult for them to migrate or makes them want to stay. We explore factors that make it difficult to change the place of residence—from here on denoted as constraints—reported in the Spanish survey on Attitudes and Expectations of Spatial Mobility in the Labour Force (N = 3892). These constraints were uniquely asked from all respondents through an open-ended question, regardless of their migration intentions. We find that many self-reported constraints correspond to factors that have previously been associated with decreased migration propensities. In order of frequency, respondents reported ties to family and friends, ties to their residential environment, financial limitations, and ties to work as constraints to migration. Our results further show that the likelihood of mentioning ties to family and friends as constraints decreased with age, was higher for women than for men and for people who lived close to most of their social network than for those who did not. Mentioning ties to the residential environment as constraints was positively associated with being partnered, and also with living in one’s birthplace. People who were unemployed were less likely to mention ties to work and were more likely to report financial limitations as constraints than people who had a permanent contract—whereas being self-employed was positively associated with mentioning ties to the residential environment.

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