Family life course transitions and the economic consequences of internal migration

Abstract

Do family life course and migration events combine to improve or hurt family economic well‐being? The interaction effects of family life course events (i.e. became married, had a child, became separated/divorced) with migration are seldom conceptualised and measured in research on the economic well‐being of families. The more usual focus of the migration literature is on family and household structure rather than on family life course processes. Based on life course transition theory and longitudinal population survey data for the 1996–1999 and 2001–2003 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation, we utilise random coefficients models in an event‐history framework to provide new evidence on how before‐ and after‐migration life course events affect post‐migration family employment, family income and family poverty, for inter‐ and intra‐state migrants. The results show that, net the effect of factors selecting families and individuals to migrate, both inter‐ and intra‐state migration have negative impacts on family employment, poverty levels and income levels, but interstate migrants experience positive income growth. Separation and divorce markedly intensify the negative effects, but becoming married consistently interacts with migration to improve family economic well‐being. The causal order of family life course events and migration matters, with childbirth and separation/divorce after migration being particularly harmful to family economic well‐being. These effects are not mediated by state economic conditions. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Examining the influence of major life events as drivers of residential mobility and neighbourhood transitions

“…The use of such analyses may be born out of necessity due to cross-sectional data limitations, but where more detailed longitudinal data is availableas it widely is -such methods heavily limit the extent to which mobility can be understood. One methodological approach that is becoming more prevalent in mobility studies (De Jong and Roempke Graefe 2008;Ginsburg et al 2011) and that is utilised here is an event history approach which focuses on the influence of both the occurrence and the timing of time-variant influences on mobility. This approach has not yet been used while considering life event data alongside broad characteristics in the context of studies examining mobility and migration.…”

“…While a lifecourse approach is by no means new (Clark and Dieleman 1996), it has not yet been widely adopted. A lifecourse approach applied to mobility theorises that mobility behaviour cannot solely be explained by an individual or family's status but also by important changes or life events that can occur throughout the whole lifecourse, from conception through to death (De Jong and Roempke Graefe 2008). This approach allows for drilling down into the heterogeneity of mobile and nonmobile groups and pulls away from notions of a simple 'good/bad' dichotomy that all people in these groups experience mobility in the same way.…”

Race, Place, and Veteran Status: Migration among Black and White Men, 1940–2000

“…Geographic mobility can be financially perilous (Geist and McManus 2008), and its economic benefits are mediated by both the sequencing of moving with other major life course events, and the distance moved (De Jong and Graefe 2008). Within family units, the risks and benefits of migration are not equally distributed.…”

Residential mobility and moving home

“…However, he goes on to describe increasing residential mobility in Western society as “both made possible by and reinforc[ing] the reduction in the significance of ‘home’” (1976, p. 83). Moving house has been linked to negative social issues such as partner separation (de Jong & Graefe, ), family breakdown (Feijten, ), housing market downturns and instability (Ferreira, Gyourko, & Tracy, ; Kull, Coley, & Lynch, ), personal discontentment (Nowok, van Ham, Findlay, & Gayle, ), and youth delinquency and drug‐use (Porter & Vogel, ; Stabler, Gurka, & Lander, ). These narratives within various disciplines of health, housing, criminology, and sociology suggest that residential mobility is contrary to the stability and safety associated with home (Winstanley, Thorns, & Perkins, ).…”