Understanding spatial mobility from early life into adulthood

ongoing

The LIFELONGMOVE project is the first of its kind to comprehensively and systematically examine spatial mobility from early age into adulthood (i.e. lifelong mobility). Research has only started to address the increasingly diverse and complex ways individuals engage in spatial mobility over the life course, and in relation to the growing inequality of opportunity. While backgrounds and circumstances in childhood shape life chances and outcomes in a later age, the extent to which childhood mobility contributes to diversity in life paths and stratified outcomes in adulthood is largely unknown. LIFELONGMOVE 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 lifelong mobility. This insight will help formulate alternatives to the conventional explanations of spatial mobility patterns, behaviours, and stratified outcomes over the life course. LIFELONGMOVE has three main innovative objectives: (i) to document the diverse and complex pathways of lifelong mobility (by examining long-term trajectories from early childhood into adulthood); (ii) to establish whether (and how) childhood mobility influences spatial mobility over the life course; and (iii) to document the impact of lifelong mobility on life conditions, by focusing on socio-economic, family, and health outcomes. To address these objectives, 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. LIFELONGMOVE breaks new ground by examining large-scale longitudinal datasets from integrated administrative registers and panel surveys that recently enabled this study for a range of European contexts, using a series of advanced quantitative methods.