Moving house, region or country are important and recurrent experiences already from an early age. The growing socio-economic disparities across households are affecting children’s resources and how they experience mobility. Moving, which is stressful and disruptive for children, often has a negative impact on cognitive, behavioural, and health outcomes for children, particularly among those from disadvantaged origins. However, moving does not always have negative consequences for children, and experiences that are deemed positive may contribute to building important resources and skills to support future mobility decisions. Yet the extent to which such contrasting moving experiences in childhood contribute to diversity in life paths and stratified outcomes in adulthood is yet to be set. Paradoxically, there is no cross-fertilization between the voluminous bodies of research that study spatial mobility in childhood and in adulthood separately. This limits our ability to understand how moving during childhood shape life chances and outcomes in later life stages. Significantly, this overlooks well-established findings on the significance of childhood experiences for later life outcomes.
LIFELONGMOVE is the first research project that comprehensively examines spatial mobility over a lifetime, from early age into adulthood. It brings together and integrates bodies of research that study spatial mobility in childhood and in adulthood separately, and provides new insight on the pathways, resources, and strategies that underlie lifetime mobility. This insight will help formulate alternatives to the conventional explanations of spatial mobility patterns, behaviours, and stratified outcomes over the life course.
The project’s three main innovative objectives are
(1) to document the diverse and complex pathways of lifetime mobility, from early childhood into adulthood;
(2) to establish whether and how childhood mobility influences spatial mobility over the life course; and
(3) to document the impact of lifetime mobility on life conditions, by focusing on socio-economic, family, and health outcomes.
LIFELONGMOVE innovates by adopting a novel approach that recognizes the experiences and resources accumulated since an early age that underlie the rationales, opportunities, and restrictions for mobility behaviour, and their associated outcomes in a later age. The project breaks new ground by examining longitudinal datasets from a range of European contexts, using a series of advanced quantitative methods.
