Abstract
This study is motivated by the increasing calls in the literature to understand long-term residential staying. We take up this issue using longitudinal data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. Until recently, the focus in life course studies has been on events rather than states and, in the case of mobility, on moving rather than the duration of stay between moves. Because most people in fact move quite infrequently, it is natural to ask—can we identify what lies beneath the decision not to move? The value of turning our attention to the decision to stay is that it refocuses attention on the people/place connection—on people staying in places and the connections they have to their local environments. We show that staying is embedded in family stability and is a direct response to long-term family and household stability. Clearly, aging matters—we are less likely to move as we age—but the research shows that both family structure and place play roles in staying, with varying outcomes for couples and singles. As previous research has also documented, the presence of children plays an important role in staying as does the stability of ownership.
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- 1.
Attrition in longitudinal surveys is always an issue, and while the rates from the HILDA survey are somewhat similar to other surveys like the BHPS, there is a higher attrition of younger single households which will modestly affect the outcomes (see Watson and Wooden 2004 for a discussion).
- 2.
Table 8.2 excludes a very small fraction of cases for which duration was not known at that time being measured—this amounts to just 33 of 3145 families.
- 3.
Detailed notes on the construction of the variables are reported in a Table 8.7 in the Appendix.
- 4.
Averaging would be a problem if we were looking at causation, but we are looking at long-run satisfaction with housing and neighborhood in relationship to moving or staying. Additionally, 90 % of the individuals in established families who did not move the association of year to year satisfaction is high.
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Acknowledgments
This chapter uses unit record data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. The HILDA project was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (Melbourne Institute). The findings and views reported in this chapter, however, are those of the author and should not be attributed to either DSS or the Melbourne Institute.
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Clark, W.A.V., Lisowski, W. (2019). Unpacking the Nature of Long-Term Residential Stability. In: Franklin, R. (eds) Population, Place, and Spatial Interaction. New Frontiers in Regional Science: Asian Perspectives, vol 40. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9231-3_8
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