Moving residence enables individuals to adapt to changing needs by accessing locations better suited to their circumstances. While well-being shifts with relocation are overall well documented, far less is known about the life satisfaction (LS) consequences of its counterfactual: remaining in place despite a preference to move. This gap partly reflects limited granularity in capturing individuals’ moving desires in most longitudinal surveys, hampering researchers’ ability to accurately account for (evolving) preferences to stay or move. Moreover, although the family migration literature has long emphasized ‘tied staying’–inhibited migration due to partner’s preference to stay–its LS implications remain unexplored.
Using the rich individual- and couple-level panel data from the British Household Panel Survey and the UK Household Longitudinal Study (1996–2024) containing yearly observation of moving desires, subsequent residential outcomes and LS, and estimating distributed fixed-effects regression models, this study shows that individuals who develop and maintain an unfulfilled desire to move (‘undesired stayers’) experience a decline in LS in the two years following the emergence of these desires. In contrast, individuals abandoning the desire to move in the second year (‘preference shifters’) return to their baseline level LS, while those who move in the second year (‘desired movers’) experience increases in LS. Partnerships mitigate the LS decreases of undesired stayers primarily when both partners prefer to move. However, tied stayers do not experience larger LS losses than single undesired stayers, which may be interpreted as suggesting that although they are constrained by their partner’s preference to stay, they are partly compensated for their inhibited spatial mobility by their partner.
Presented by:
Elias Hofmann (German Federal Institute for Population Research (BiB))
Date & time:
June 24, 2026 12:30 pm - June 24, 2026 1:30 pm
Venue:
SSRC416 (2N2.4.16)
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