Is spatial mobility on the rise or in decline? An order-specific analysis of the migration of young adults in Sweden
Abstract
The aim of this study is to investigate spatial mobility over time. Research on ‘new mobilities’ suggests increasing movement of individuals, technology, and information. By contrast, studies of internal migration report declining spatial mobility in recent decades. Using longitudinal register data from Sweden, we calculate annual order-specific migration rates to investigate the spatial mobility of young adults over the last three decades. We standardize mobility rates for educational enrolment, educational level, family status, and place of residence to determine how much changes in individuals’ life domains explain changes in mobility. Young adults’ migration rates increased significantly in the 1990s; although all order-specific migration rates increased, first migration rates increased the most. Changes in population composition, particularly increased enrolment in higher education, accounted for much of the elevated spatial mobility in the 1990s. The analysis supports neither ever increasing mobility nor a long-term rise in rootedness among young adults in Sweden.
Citation
Kulu , H , Lundholm , E & Malmberg , G 2018 , ' Is spatial mobility on the rise or in decline? An order-specific analysis of the migration of young adults in Sweden ' , Population Studies , vol. 72 , no. 3 , pp. 323-337 . https://doi.org/10.1080/00324728.2018.1451554
Publication
Population Studies
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0032-4728Type
Journal article
Rights
© 2018 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
The study was supported by a research grant from the Economic and Social Research Council [ES/L01663X/1] under the Open Research Area Plus scheme.Collections
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