Acquired demographics and reasons to relocate among self-initiated expatriates

Abstract

Organizational expatriates, who have been assigned by their parent companies to the foreign location have been thoroughly investigated as compared to self-initiated expatriates, who themselves have decided to expatriate to work abroad. Consequently, much less is known about the latter type of expatriates. To help alleviate this dearth of research findings, data was collected from 428 self-initiated expatriate academics from 60 countries employed in 35 universities in five northern European countries. Four acquired demographic characteristics were investigated: marital status, nationality, previous expatriate experience and seniority, as well as five individual reasons to expatriate: adventure/travel, career, family, financial incentives and life change/escape. The results indicated support for the research propositions, suggesting that self-initiated expatriates' (SIEs) reasons to expatriate differ in terms of acquired personal characteristics. Implications of these findings are discussed in detail.

Keywords:

• acquired demographics
• expatriate academics
• reasons to expatriate
• self-initiated expatriates

Notes

1. Since Chronbach's alpha to a certain extent is a function of the number of items, the inter-item correlation (icc) may be a better measure of reliability for two-item scales with a minimum level of iic = 0.25 (Nunnally 1978).