Abstract
Living in cities affects young adults' access to education and work. With the use of register data for 2000–2013, we examined the role of having siblings and parents living close by and having siblings and parents living in the area of origin, in young adults' return migration from the four largest cities in Sweden. We found that young adults were less likely to return, and also less likely to migrate elsewhere, if they had siblings or parents living in the city of residence than if this was not the case. If the parents no longer lived in the region of origin, the young adults were very unlikely to return. Young adults were more likely to return if they had siblings living in that region than if they had no siblings or the siblings lived elsewhere. Adverse circumstances such as dropping out of tertiary education, low income, and unemployment were associated with a greater likelihood of return migration.
Highlights
Migration to a large city is a major step in the life courses of many young adults in developed countries
Subsequently spending an episode in a large city, allows them to make use of the ample opportunities for education and work that such cities tend to offer. For some of these young adults, the city will turn out to be attractive enough to remain there for a long time; others will move back to their home region or move on to other locations. (Note: We use the terms “home region” and “region of origin” interchangeably to refer to the previous region of residence of the young adult, where at least one parent lived before the young adult moved.) Clearly, the outcomes of the location choices of young adults who moved to cities—staying in the city, moving back, and moving on—are important in many ways
We contribute an investigation of the importance of siblings in young adults' return migration from large cities to the region in which they, and at least one of the parents, lived before they moved to the city
Summary
Migration to a large city is a major step in the life courses of many young adults in developed countries. (Note: Because our study population is rather young and previous research has shown that those under 40 are much more likely to move towards parents for their own needs than for their parents' needs [e.g., Smits, 2010; Smits, Van Gaalen, & Mulder, 2010], we refrain from investigating the associations between return migration and parental support needs.) Co-residence in the parental home has been identified as an important form of support from parents to young adult children, albeit more so in Southern European than Nordic countries (Albertini & Kohli, 2013). Successful completion of education could lead to return migration, for example, if the return was already planned before the move to the city (Haartsen & Thissen, 2014) or if the young adults find employment in the home region after obtaining a high level of education (compare Stone et al, 2014). We discuss the results of some additional descriptive analyses in which we explored different specifications of the main independent variables
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