Determinants of residential mobility: an adaptive retrospective survey method

ABSTRACT

This study introduces a survey instrument to collect retrospective life-course events, focusing on residential relocation, and it utilizes the survey to evaluate determinants of residential mobility. The survey consists of seven modules collecting information about household structure and household demographics, latest residential relocation, current and previous home, employment, education, vehicle ownership, and travel behavior. The time window of the life-course calendar in the survey is customized according to the latest residential relocation as an anchor point to assist with memory recollection and balance the required input from participants. The survey is used to collect data from a sample of 514 respondents in Sydney, Australia, and another sample of 404 respondents in Chicago, Illinois, in the US. The Cox proportional hazard model is used to analyze residential mobility. The results show primary school commencement is a salient determinant of residential relocation, but its impact is significantly higher in Chicago compared to Sydney.

KEYWORDS:

• retrospective survey
• life-course calendar
• residential mobility
• school commencement

Acknowledgments

Taha Rashidi acknowledges the support from the Australian Research Council DECRA grant (DE170101346).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In Sydney Australia more than 50% of daily trips are mandatory trips with fixed destination NSW 2010. Transport Data Center (2010) 2008/09 Household Travel Survey Summary Report 2010 Release. REPORT.

2. We considered other categories of employment and education as well, but we only report the model with the highest goodness-of-fit and meaningful and interpretable coefficients.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research CouncilDE170101346.