Modelling individual and place variations in residential moves using commercial data and official statistics

Through its ability to transform local area population size, composition and character, residential mobility is a subject of particular relevance for policy makers, service providers, academics and, to some extent, the population at large. Whilst the phenomenon can be understood in very basic terms as the relocation of an individual and/or household from one geographic location to another, the place-based and subject-specific determinants that are said to inform population movement, and the associated propensities and trends, are inherently complex and multifaceted.
There is a long tradition in the quantitative study of population movement in Great Britain, with a great many models calibrated using different data sources of varying detail, size and coverage and designed with the purpose of providing improved interpretation and understanding of either micro (individual/household) or macro (area) processes. In this thesis a new source of commercial data is employed which has the potential to allow for a novel break from the traditional dichotomy of the micro/macro approach. Indeed, through the combined use of detailed geo-referenced and geographically extensive microdata, appropriate statistical methods, and well-informed micro and macro theory, this work is able to simultaneously measure, analyse and interpret a variety of individual and place variations in residential mobility in Britain.
The thesis integrates a previously unused source of commercial data with official statistics and provides unique insights into various multilevel patterns, propensities and characteristics of residential mobility that have, whilst long theorised, often been difficult to demonstrate empirically due to a longstanding dearth in access to suitably detailed data and methods. In particular, new insights are gained through the examination of a number of understudied subjective and behavioural characteristics of movers vis-à-vis stayers across different life-course stages, the detailed interrogation of duration-of-residence effects and associated residential exposure times on future movement propensities and the simultaneous analysis of micro and macrogeographical (origin and destination) variations in the postcode-to-postcode distance travelled by recent movers.