Selective migration and urban–rural differences in subjective well-being: Evidence from the United Kingdom

Abstract

Although more and more people choose to live in (large) cities, people in the Western world generally report lower levels of subjective well-being in urban areas than in rural areas. This article examines whether these urban–rural differences in subjective well-being are (partly) driven by selective migration patterns. To this end, we utilise residential mobility data from the United Kingdom based on 12 waves of the British Household Panel Survey. We explore urban–rural differences in life satisfaction as well as changes in life satisfaction of people moving from rural areas to urban areas (or vice versa), hereby paying specific attention to selection and composition effects. The results show that selective migration can, at least partly, explain the urban–rural subjective well-being differential through the selection of less satisfied people in cities and more satisfied people in the countryside. While the average life satisfaction of urban–rural migrants is higher compared to the life satisfaction of rural–urban migrants, we do not find – on average – long-lasting life satisfaction effects of migration. At the same time, there are differences between sociodemographic groups in that we find that a move from the countryside to the city is positively associated with the life satisfaction of students while it is negatively associated with the life satisfaction of people with a non-tertiary education.

Rural–urban differences in personality traits and well‐being in adulthood

“…This was true for both MIDUS and HRS participants; however, these effects were not robust to the inclusion of socio‐demographic and social network covariates. Moreover, there were no rural–urban differences in life satisfaction in either study, contrary to our hypotheses and large body of empirical work (e.g., Buecker et al, 2021; Burger et al, 2020; Hoogerbrugge & Burger, 2022; Wang & Wang, 2016). This pattern of results is intriguing because it suggests that rural and urban residents have similar levels of life satisfaction, and that rural–urban differences in psychological well‐being may be explained by the co‐occurrence of rurality with sociodemographic and social network factors.…”

“…A fairly extensive body of work has examined rural–urban differences in various aspects of subjective well‐being (i.e., life satisfaction, happiness, positive and negative affect), showing that people who live in rural contexts tend to have lower levels of subjective well‐being and higher levels of loneliness than people who reside in urban contexts (Buecker et al, 2021; Burger et al, 2020; Hoogerbrugge & Burger, 2022; Wang & Wang, 2016). However, few studies have investigated rural–urban differences in personality or psychological well‐being (e.g., autonomy, purpose in life, self‐acceptance) levels.…”

Progressive cities: Urban–rural polarisation of social values and economic development around the world

“…Future research using more advanced causal inference techniques, and/or in-depth qualitative tools, may well analyse in more detail the causality behind our findings. Qualitative studies have already begun to address these questions (Evans, 2019), but further work – for example, using long panel surveys and analytical techniques that can allow controlling for individual unobservable characteristics – might be able to better identify the extent to which the results we uncover are driven by place and socialisation (McNeil et al, 2022) or, instead, purely by selective mobility and the spatial sorting of ‘more progressive’ people into large urban areas (Bosquet and Overman, 2019; Hoogerbrugge and Burger, 2022; Maxwell, 2019).…”

Moravian–Slovak Borderland: Possibilities for Rural Development

“…We assume that contemporary people in Europe are moving from places with a lower quality of life to places with a higher quality of life-no matter how individuals define the quality of life. Hoogerbrugge and Burger [49] admitted that at least part of selective migration can be explained by differences in life satisfactionespecially on the side of urban-rural migration. Of course, it can be argued that some people cannot move out of low-quality-of-life areas for financial or other reasons.…”