Lower emotional stability predicted higher probability of moving due to neighborhood, housing, & family, while higher agreeableness was associated with lower probability due to neighborhood & education

Personality traits and reasons for residential mobility: Longitudinal data from United Kingdom, Germany, and Australia. Markus Jokela. Personality and Individual Differences, Volume 180, October 2021, 110978. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.110978

Abstract: Personality traits have been associated with differences in residential mobility, but details are lacking on the types of residential moves associated with personality differences. The present study pooled data from four prospective cohort studies from the United Kingdom (UK Household Longitudinal Survey, and British Household Panel Survey), Germany (Socioeconomic Panel Study), and Australia (Household, Income, and Labour Dynamics in Australia) to assess whether personality traits of the Five Factor Model are differently related to residential moves motivated by different reasons to move: employment, education, family, housing, and neighborhood (total n = 86,073). Openness to experience was associated with all moves but particularly with moves due to employment and education. Extraversion was associated with higher overall mobility, except for moves motivated by employment and education. Lower emotional stability predicted higher probability of moving due to neighborhood, housing, and family, while higher agreeableness was associated with lower probability of moving due to neighborhood and education. Adjusting for education, household income, marital status, employment status, number of children in the household, and housing tenure did not substantially change the associations. These results suggest that different personality traits may motivate different types of residential moves.

Keywords: PersonalityMigrationMobilityDemographyGeographical psychology

4. Discussion

The current results from four prospective cohort studies suggest that personality differences are related to people's motivations to move. Openness to experience was associated with higher overall mobility but especially with mobility due to education and employment. Extraversion was also related to higher overall mobility, except moves driven by employment or education. Higher emotional stability and higher agreeableness were associated with lower residential mobility: emotional stability due to neighborhood, housing, and family, and agreeableness due to neighborhood and education. Conscientiousness was not related to residential mobility.

In Western developed countries, between 10% and 25% of households change residence every two years (Sánchez & Andrews, 2011). Economic and demographic perspectives emphasize the practical determinants of residential mobility: people move after jobs, they move to larger or smaller homes as family size changes, or they try to move away from neighborhoods they dislike (Findlay et al., 2015; Kley, 2011). The present results demonstrate that personality is not competing with sociodemographic factors as an explanation for residential mobility. Instead, people's personality traits determine, in part, how strongly their residential mobility is determined by different mobility motivations. The role of personality is thus not restricted to only predicting moves that are unrelated to sociodemographic drivers of mobility (e.g., employment or housing) but can be observed across multiple reasons for moving.

Openness to experience and extraversion are the two personality traits that have been most consistently associated with residential mobility in previous studies (Campbell, 2019; Ciani & Capiluppi, 2011; Jokela, 2009, Jokela, 2020), and the current findings provide further support for their role in residential mobility. Openness to experience was a particularly strong predictor of moves related to employment and education. Openness to experience was related to educational achievement, and sociodemographic covariates accounted for about half of its associations with mobility related to employment and education. Beyond the socioeconomic correlates, individuals with high openness to experience may be more curious and willing to explore new places (Silvia & Christensen, 2020), which increases the likelihood of moving after opportunities of higher education and employment, and moving for other reasons as well. Extraversion was also related to higher overall mobility rates. Individuals with high extraversion are energetic, active, assertive, and sensitive to rewarding experiences (Smillie, 2013). These characteristics may increase the probability of planning to move and taking action to move, and also to perceive the move to a new location as an opportunity rather than a risk.

Lower emotional stability was associated with higher mobility rates, mainly due to neighborhood, housing, and family. Individuals with low emotional stability are sensitive to negative emotions and distress (Jeronimus et al., 2016). It is therefore plausible that any dissatisfaction with the neighborhood or housing conditions is experienced more strongly by individuals with low compared to high emotional stability (Jokela, 2009), and the heightened dissatisfaction with neighborhoods or housing conditions may explain the association between low emotional stability and mobility. Higher agreeableness, in turn, was related to lower mobility due to neighborhood and education. This may be related to highly agreeable people's stronger commitment and integration with their local communities (Lounsbury et al., 2003), which could help to explain why they are less eager to move.

Conscientiousness was not related to residential mobility. Studies from the United States (Jokela, 2009) and Australia (with the same HILDA data as used here; Campbell, 2019) have also reported no significant associations with conscientiousness. However, conscientiousness may influence more specific forms of residential mobility. In HILDA, higher conscientiousness predicted higher probability of rural-to-urban migration but was not associated with urban-to-rural migration (Jokela, 2020), suggesting that conscientiousness may be associated with selective residential mobility to specific locations. And in a previous study with the BHPS, higher conscientiousness predicted higher migration probability among those participants who intended or desired to move but lower migration probability among those who did not intend or desire to move (Jokela, 2014). This suggests that the influence of conscientiousness on residential mobility depends on the person's mobility intentions, so that highly conscientious individuals are more likely to stick to their plans of either moving or not moving. A previous analysis with HILDA (Campbell, 2019) also observed that conscientiousness was related to how migration intentions aligned with migration outcomes among those who migrated. The current study did not assess mobility intentions, so such associations could not be assessed here.

The findings indicate that sociodemographic and personality explanations for residential mobility are not competing or mutually exclusive. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that moves related to employment and education were predicted only by one personality trait (openness to experience) whereas neighborhood-related moves were predicted by four personality traits (all traits except conscientiousness). Housing-related moves were also predicted by only one personality trait (emotional stability) and family-related moves by two traits (extraversion and emotional stability). Together these patterns suggest that personality may have the broadest influence on residential mobility via neighborhood preferences. Except for the two strongest associations of openness to experience, the magnitudes of the personality associations were mostly modest, so the role of personality in determining residential mobility patterns should not be overemphasized. However, even modest associations may accumulate into important population-level differences over 20–30 years (Jokela, 2020).

The study has some limitations that could be addressed in future studies. First, the study focused on reason-specific moves but did not consider moving distances that can be related to reasons to move (Thomas, 2019). Some of the personality associations with reason-specific moves may thus overlap with willingness to move over longer distances. Second, the current analysis considered only personality of individuals but did not consider possible family dynamics in which the personality associations depend on the personality traits, or other characteristics, of the spouse, because the decision to move concerns the whole family. Third, the analysis did not consider other contextualized associations that may arise over the life course (Findlay et al., 2015; Kley, 2011). For example, some personality traits may become particularly important for work-related mobility for individuals who become unemployed, or for family-related and housing-related mobility when individuals become parents. Fourth, it must be emphasized that the present results are based on meta-analytic results across three countries. The study-specific associations suggested considerable similarities between countries (see supplementary material), but it is also possible that some of the associations between personality and residential mobility vary by country or region, because different locations are characterized by different residential mobility patterns. Fifth, it would also be informative to study people's self-reported reasons for staying in their current neighborhood instead of moving away.

In sum, the present findings provide contextualized data on how different personality traits predict residential mobility due to different reasons to move. Neighborhood characteristics and sociodemographic factors associated with different life stages are important drivers of residential mobility. However, personality does not need to be considered as competing with sociodemographic explanations of residential mobility. Rather, personality traits appear to influence the relative weight of different motivating factors in guiding people's mobility decisions.