Home ownership,life cycle stage,and residential mobility

Previous research has shown that mobility rates decline with increasing age and duration of residence. These relationships are investigated further for the case of residential mobility using residence histories obtained in interviews with 2264 Rhode Island residents. Three methods of classifying segments of a person’s life into life cycle stages are compared: age, life cycle stages based on marital status and child-rearing periods, and a combined age-marital status classification. These classifications were not found to be equivalent in that there was considerable variation in mobility rates by life cycle stage within age categories and by age within life cycle categories. The age-marital status classification was selected for use in the remainder of the analysis because it had the least variation in mobility rates within categories and required far less data for computation than the life cycle stages. When mobility rates were examined by home ownership, age-marital status, and duration of previous residence, it was observed that there was little variation in mobility rates by duration for home owners while the mobility rates for renters declined with duration.