A Study on Factors Influencing Intention of Continuous Residence of Younger Population in Jeollabuk-do: Focused on Text Network Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore and analyze factors that may affect the improvement of the settlement will of the young population in local small and medium-sized cities. Specifically, this study limited the scope of the study to “the young population aged 25 to 49 living in Jeollabuk-do” based on the fact that the population outflow of local small and medium-sized cities occurs mainly, and collected a total of 570 short-answer data using Macromill Embrain's online panel. Subsequently, word frequency analysis, centrality analysis, and social network analysis were conducted through a data preprocessing process for the collected subjective response data. As a result of the analysis, it was found that physical environmental factors in the region were important for the settlement intention of the young population in local small and medium-sized cities. In particular, among the physical environmental factors, the centrality index for convenience facilities, jobs, and natural environment was relatively high. Therefore, local small and medium-sized cities facing the crisis of population decline due to the departure of the resident population today will need to prioritize the aforementioned factors and make efforts to improve them. On the other hand, the fact that this study collected data using open questions and conducted language network analysis centered on them can be seen as an important contribution academically compared to the fact that most existing studies rely only on structured questionnaire items.