Last week I mentioned our seminar series running through March and April. We had a very interesting presentation last Friday (8 March) from Elizabeth Creed who reported on the work she has been doing with in-depth interviews of Northern Territory residents. She wanted to see why people moved to the Northern Territory and what was influencing their decisions to stay or move again. It is interesting work for us, because normally we break down quantitative data to summarise a motive for people – work, family, holiday, lifestyle etc. Elizabeth and her colleagues have been using the work of Faist (1997) that distinguishes between macro (economic conditions, housing market etc), meso (family networks, friendship networks etc) and micro (individual decisions) influences on migration. They wanted to see how well their participants (they have interviewed over 70 people) fit this model.
As a side note – we are currently looking at the relationship between in-migration to the NT and unemployment conditions in the rest of Australia. Our hypothesis is that increasing unemployment elsewhere increases immigration to the NT (which is seen as having more job opportunities), but that decreasing unemployment elsewhere (like we have now) will slow down immigration. I’ll show a pretty graph for that in a couple of weeks’ time!
Anyway, what Elizabeth found was that migration decisions are rarely the result of a single event or circumstance. People experience a combination of factors that ultimately result in them being somewhere else – often unpredictably. So there were interviewees who came to the NT (maybe for a holiday or a general ‘look around’), found a job and stayed – but they also had a job “back home” that they were quite happy with – so the ‘push-pull’ thing was more complex than you might initially think. Some interviewees moved to the NT and found, almost by conincidence, that they had extended family here. Now they have strengthened their ties with the extended family (who did not ’cause’ their original move) and so they are more embedded in the NT than the models would predict.
This stuff is consistent with what we are learning about motives to come and go from the NT. The NT (or any destination) fits a particular set of needs at a particular time. Leaving does not necessarily mean that you no longer like the NT, just that your needs have changed. In the same way, arriving doesn;t mean you have an overall preference for the NT, just that it happens to meet some set of needs at that point in time. “Settling down” is likely to be a whole other process – and there are indications that people who move a lot during their lives are a) the sort of people who are likely to wind up in the NT at some point and b) less likely to get to that “settle down” phase while they are in the NT.
Next week (20 March) I am giving a seminar outlining the overall direction of population studies research at Charles Darwin University, and giving some potted examples of the sorts of findings coming out of the research program. I’ll post my script when it is all done.
1 response so far ↓
Elizabeth Creed // 14 March, 2008 at 3:05 pm
The comment that “The NT (or any destination) fits a particular set of needs at a particular time. Leaving does not necessarily mean that you no longer like the NT, just that your needs have changed. In the same way, arriving doesn’t mean you have an overall preference for the NT, just that it happens to meet some set of needs at that point in time.” fits very nicely with the way I am looking at the mobility choices of older people using a life course perspective.
Conventional studies have looked at the way external events are associated with life course transitions and residential mobility (e.g. leaving home for education, getting married, starting a family, building a career, retirement) but I am interested in how internal needs may also affect residential mobility. People at later stages of life are said to experience a personal dilemma between generativity and stagnation (Erikson’s seventh stage of psychosocial development). Generativity is embodied in the belief that an individual has “made a difference” in a positive way to others (children, grandchildren, work colleagues, society as a whole) and stagnation refers to a sense of futility, remoteness from others and lack of involvement in community. If people consider the NT to be a place where they are able to live a ‘generative life’, then this may be a reason keeping them here. The concept of a ‘generative life’ may also explain why some people are so attracted to wherever their grandchildren are living. On the other hand, if people feel that the NT does not offer them opportunities to contribute to community, if they have the feeling that they “have done all there is to do” in a social or work environment, then this may be a reason for leaving.