Small Stories of Home Moves: A Gendered and Generational Breadth-and-Depth Investigation

Abstract

This article explores the way people from different age cohorts and genders talk about home moves to contribute a rounded and nuanced relational understanding. We draw on a secondary analysis of qualitative longitudinal data from multiple archived studies, using a breadth-and-depth analytic approach. Conceptually, we apply a linked lives perspective that understands home moves as tied to sets of social relationships and involving the navigation of structural circumstances. We identify complex discrete and serial small stories where moving away from or returning to is interdependently linked to others staying put, and staying put to others’ home moves, at local, intra-national, and trans-national levels. Home moves are shaped structurally by gender and age cohort generation. Home and moving tend to be more salient in women’s accounts, articulating with familial generation as their own and others’ comings and goings accumulated over their lifetime. Structural issues are also evident in the material and social resources that enable and constrain home moves, with more micro-level identification of recurrent themes of anxieties in the accounts of men who are starting/have young families, in contrast to women’s anxieties concerning the relational implications of home moves.