Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Click here to sign up for SAGE Journal Email Alerts today!

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
Sociological Methods & Research
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow References
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Right arrow Citation Map
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Right arrow Citing Articles via Scopus
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Stovel, K.
Right arrow Articles by Bolan, M.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Complore   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati   Add to Twitter  
What's this?

Residential Trajectories

Using Optimal Alignment to Reveal The Structure of Residential Mobility

Katherine Stovel

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

Sociological Methods & Research, Vol. 32, No. 4, 559-598 (2004)
DOI: 10.1177/0049124103262683
Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati   Add to Twitter Twitter    What's this?