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Tony Champion, University of Newcastle and Ian Shuttleworth, Queen's University, Belfast
(Project no. 04010063, previously 401006)
Studying how mobility rates - here defined as changes of address within a country - have altered over the longer term, and why, is pressing for policy reasons as well as for understanding social change and evaluating social theories about these changes. Empirical evidence on trends is mixed. In some countries, such as the USA and Canada, mobility rates, particularly over longer distances, have fallen since the 1960s whereas in Europe and Australia similar declines do not seem to have occurred. Therefore in some world areas there is a mismatch between social theories that proclaim a 'world on the move' and observed mobility patterns at some geographical scales.
This LS 2011 beta test project takes England and Wales as a case study. It builds on our previous work on trends in inter-regional movement in the UK, which used NHS-derived data for the years ending June 1976 through to 2011. This suggested that there was no long-term decline in mobility overall and by sex and age, merely fluctuations linked to stages in business cycle. The aim with the LS data is to identify how a much wider range of personal characteristics affects individual people's propensity to move home and how the power of these determinants has changed over time. The project takes advantage of the span of anonymised data on LS members' whereabouts from the last five decennial censuses.
The LS provides two routes into tracking migration rates over time, namely using the variables derived from the one-year migration question in each of these censuses and using the derived variables relating to 10-year change of address for the four intercensal decades. The project focuses primarily on the latter, as - while this approach will miss multiple changes of address by individuals over a decade - it gives more scope for setting our own definitions of type of move and allows us to characterise people by pre-move as well as post-move status. The primary mode of analysis will be the calculation of migration rates for all persons and population subgroups, followed by exploratory analyses using binary regression.