An Analysis of American Migration Careers

Abstract

From the view point of ‘migrations in one's life history’, entire migration careers should be considered. A migration career means a sequence of moves an individual has experienced throughout one's life. Conditions of migration careers would give important clues to deeper understanding of migration behavior. Unfortunately, many of the previous longitudinal data of migration histories were too fragmented to clarify entire patterns of individual migration careers. Therefore, an analysis of migration histories, using more suitable materials, is necessary. In this paper, based on my field survey, I investigated American mobility, through description and classification of migration careers. Statistical methods for the procedures were proposed.Field survey and subjects:This field survey was conducted in two small university towns, one on the West Coast and the other in the East South Central States-Santa Barbara, CA, and Lexington, KY (Fig. 1). Materials on the migration history were collected through interviews with 126 subjects (48 in Santa Barbara and 78 in Lexington). The subjects had the common characteristic of being ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and belonging to an upper middle or middle class’.Statistical procedures:1) Migration-career graph-A migration career can be drawn as a graph which has the horizontal axis representing age and the vertical axis representing the number of moves. 8 examples were shown in Fig. 4.2) Transit vector-I proposed a transit vector [θ1, θ2, θ3, θ4] to abstract geometrical features from a migration-career graph, Change of mobility through one's life course can be summarized as elements in a vector. θ1 indicates mobility (moves/years) in an age-bracket of 0≤ θ3≥θ4=0 or ≥1] (Fig. 5 and Table 3).c) Younger generations have higher mobility than older ones have. The rise of mobility during the age-bracket of 18≤<40 causes the change (Fig. 6).d) The percentage of intra-urban migration has been increasing. Most of all the moves were carried out within a fairly small sphere.