If you move, I move: The social influence effect on residential mobility

There are many theories that account for why households move between residential areas. In this paper, we advance on this by formulating a new mechanism whereby a household’s probability of leaving a neighborhood is informed by the number of other households who have previously left that neighborhoo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PloS one 2022-07, Vol.17 (7), p.e0270783-e0270783
Main Authors: de la Prada, Àlex G, Tapia, Eduardo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biology and Life Sciences
Computer and Information Sciences
Earth Sciences
Households
Housing
Influence
Labor unions
Mobility
Neighborhoods
People and places
Physical Sciences
Research and Analysis Methods
Residential areas
Residential mobility
Residential segregation
Samhällsvetenskap
Segregation
Social aspects
Social environment
social influence - residential mobility - segregation
Social Sciences
Socioeconomic factors
Sociologi
Sociologi (exklusive socialt arbete, socialpsykologi och socialantropologi)
Sociology
Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)
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Summary:There are many theories that account for why households move between residential areas. In this paper, we advance on this by formulating a new mechanism whereby a household’s probability of leaving a neighborhood is informed by the number of other households who have previously left that neighborhood. We call this mechanism: the social influence (SI) effect. By applying matching to Swedish register data for Stockholm County (1998–2017), and after adjusting for theoretically relevant confounders from the existing literature, we find that SI has a significant effect on neighborhood out-mobility. Furthermore, we find that the SI effect is moderated by the visibility with which others’ behaviors is observed, measured as the number of previous out-movers, the distance to ego, and its salience in the social environment. Our study also discusses some ways in which SI might be entangled with other mechanisms, and outlines future directions from which studies of residential segregation dynamics might be approached.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0270783