Do Secondary Motives Shape Migration? The Interplay between Labour Markets, Residential Qualities and Family Ties

Viktor Venhorst , University of Groningen
Brian J. Gillespie, University of Groningen

In this paper we will investigate primary motives for migration in relation to secondary motives for migration. Using survey data from Sweden, which was linked to the Swedish registers (Niedomysl, 2009), we first establish which (combinations of) primary and secondary motives were mentioned by the respondents in the unique open-ended question format in the survey. We demonstrate that there is considerable heterogeneity, also according to age, in the motives and combination of motives that are mentioned. A hierarchy between primary and secondary is difficult to establish. A variety of different approaches to establishing primary and secondary motive, “order of appearance”, “content-based”, “randomised ranking” and respondent-sourced hierarchy leads to very similar results. Following this, we model migration distance, comparing various approaches to motive coding and controlling for a rich set of personal and regional characteristics. Models which include a secondary motive outperform approaches which only take the primary motive into account. We conclude that, rather than a well-ordered set of considerations, it is the combination of motives that matters most. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates that there is a scope for the analysis of secondary migration motives.

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 Presented in Session 10. Internal Migration and Urbanization