Spatial Mobility, Migration, and Living Arrangements

This book brings together ten original empirical works focusing on the influence of various types of spatial mobility – be it international or national– on partnership, family and work life. The contributions cover a range of important topics which focus on understanding how spatial mobility is related to familial relationships and life course transitions. The volume offers new insights by bringing together the state of the art in theoretical and empirical approaches from spatial mobility and international migration research. This includes, for example, studies that investigate the relationships between international migration and changing patterns of partnership choice, family formation and fertility. Complementing to this, this volume presents new empirical studies on job-related residential mobility and its impact on the relationship quality of couples, family life, and union dissolution. It also highlights the importance of research that looks at the reciprocal relationships between mobility and life course events such as young adults leaving the parental home in international migration context, re-arrangements of family life after divorce and spatial mobility of the elderly following life transitions. The scholarly work included in this volume does not only contribute to theoretical debates but also provide timely empirical evidence from various societies which represent the common features in the dynamics of spatial mobility and migration.

• Changing patterns of union and family formation
• Familiar relationships and transitions
• Intimate relationships, marriages, family relations
• Life-course research
• Partner choice and fertility
• Spatial mobility and international migration

“The emphasis of this book is a subset of the interconnection of migration and life course events … this edited volume is an important book for those studying migration and family structure. The ten empirical studies cover a range of important topics that will surely stimulate interest in research on spatial mobility and living arrangements.” (Barry Edmonston, Canadian Studies in Population, Vol. 45 (1-2), 2018)

“It approaches migration from several scientific views, with particular emphasis on social sciences and demography. The book also examines both international and internal aspects of migration. … Summing up: all the 11 articles are interesting and of high quality, binding together spatial movement and life course events. … The book can be recommended especially for graduate students and researchers in the field.” (Ismo Söderling, Nordic Journal of Migration Research, Vol. 6 (3), 2016)

“This volume addresses various kinds of spatial mobility (commuting, residential mobility, migration) and their connections with living arrangements. … the book does bring together some very nice pieces of empirical research. Most of this research is original work not published elsewhere … . The book furthermore presents a nice mixture of quantitative and qualitative work, which adds to its attractiveness. … This book provides welcome examples of the type of research we need to understand this growing complexity.” (Clara H. Mulder, European Journal of Population/Revue européenne de Démographie, Vol. 31, 2015)

• Faculty of Social Sciences, Bremen University of Applied Sciences, Bremen, Germany

  Can M. Aybek

• Universität Bremen, Bremen, Germany

  Johannes Huinink

• Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital (IIASA, VID/ÖAW and WU), Vienna Institute of Demography, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria

  Raya Muttarak

Policies and ethics