Frequency of Moving Home in Northern Ireland.

The aim of the project is to shed light on how frequently people move home, and especially about the types of people who change address the most and also the least. This question is prompted by our recent research on England and Wales using the ONS Longitudinal Study to examine change of address between one census and the next, 1971-2011, which itself was prompted by observations of sharp declines in migration intensity in the USA and some other developed countries. This study found that a substantial proportion of LS members stay put between censuses and that this proportion has been increasing, up from 45% in 1971-81 to 55% in 2001-11. Unfortunately, this information cannot answer the question as to whether the total number of address changes has reduced, because it misses multiple moves between censuses, which might have increased in volume over the decades.

The basic objective is to analyse the number of address changes made by NILS members between 2001 and 2015, classifying them as either non-movers, one-address-changers or multiple-address-changers and then examining the distinctive characteristics of these groups. Secondly, a comparison will be made in the intensity of home moving for between before and after the onset of the Great Recession, i.e. comparing 2001-08 with 2008-15, in order to identify whether there are any signs of a slowdown in residential mobility and try and establish whether this might be a permanent change in migration behaviour. One specific output is to measure the relationship between the total numbers of address changes over a 10-year period like 2001-11 and the number of people who were living at a different address at the end of the period from at the start, thereby providing intelligence on how much the latter underestimates total moves.