EFFECT SIZE OF GENDER ON THE STAY MOTIVES OF UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Abstract

Men and women participate in international migration almost equally, yet theoretical and empirical researches have been concentrated much more on factors influencing men’s decision to migrate. As men and women have different roles in the society and economy in general, the same holds true for the migration process. Gender has shown to be important when it comes to the decision to migrate or to stay as well as it has different impact on the family, household and community in both sending and receiving country. Lately, there is increasing awareness of academic scholars that migration is a gendered phenomenon which requires fresh theoretical and empirical underpinnings to be able to grasp the complex picture of gendered outcomes of migration on personal, micro- or macro-level. The focus of this paper are stay factors, i.e. reasons why an individual will stay in his/her home country and as such they need to be overcome before the push and pull factors shape a decision to migrate. The main goal of this paper is to explore whether gender has a significant multivariate effect on the linear combination of the stay motives perceived by university students. This paper also tries to find whether there are significant univariate effects for each of the stay motives separately. A one-way multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) and several non- parametric tests were performed to explore these effects. The results show that gender matters when it comes to stay motives mostly related to the perception of social networks and inherited amenities of the place.