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Residential Trajectories

Using Optimal Alignment to Reveal The Structure of Residential Mobility

University of Washington, Seattle

Marc Bolan

Organizational Research Services

This article illustrates the challenges and potential advantages associated with using a sequence-based method to describe the structure of individual residential mobility histories. The authors examine the existence and prevalence of distinctive patterns of residential mobility across a rural-suburban-urban place-type continuum. They identify a finite set of empirically common residential trajectories that describe patterns of movement across the geographic landscape. This approach reveals (1) a great deal of stability in patterns of residential attachment; (2) that residential movement is frequently organized in terms of place-type, rather than in terms of specific locations; and (3) that certain place-types are rarely linked together in residential histories, which suggests that the universe of place-types contains social boundaries. Combining the empirically observed residential trajectories with basic demographic characteristics of individuals confirms general expectations from the life course perspective about the roles and positions individuals occupy over different stages of adulthood.

Key Words: optimal alignment • residential mobility

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