"Moving for the Kids" and the consequences for the resident segregation. The perceived quality of schools and neighborhoods as the cause of residential mobility of families with and without a migration background.

"Moving for the Kids" – residential mobility of families can be motivated to improve the developmental opportunities for the children. On the basis of regionally comparative standardized surveys the planned project examines, how the perceived quality of schools and neighborhoods - among other reasons - influences relocations and housing decisions of families with and without a migration background. For the first time in Germany, the question of whether – in connection with perceived contextual factors of school and neighborhood – parents' motives for maintaining or improving the educational status of their children as well as for maintaining ethnic-cultural capital trigger small-scale migrations is being systematically investigated. These relocations can intensify (white flight) or reduce (spatial assimilation) ethnic segregation - and at the same time influence the kind and extent of social segregation. The project contributes to the analysis of the causes of the spatial mobility behaviour of families with and without a migration background in Germany, but extended by the presumably central factor of parental status resp. aspiration.
We expect that housing decisions of young couples and families, especially those from the middle class, are also affected by to which extend they view the local school and neighbourhood as being conducive to the education and development of their (future) children. Contextual characteristics such as high poverty rates and high concentration of migrants in the neighbourhood and schools are perceived as "push" factors. For families with a migration background we suspect that there are motives for preserving local ethnic-cultural capital, which could lower the relevance of educationally motivated moves.
In the first step, it will be clarified how strongly motives of children's educational success - also among other motives - influence the assessment of local context conditions, whether families with and without a migration background differ in this respect, and how these motives trigger relocations in interaction with the perceived social and ethnic composition of schools and neighbourhoods. In a second step, it will be investigated how realized moves - aggregated at the macro level - support ethnic and social segregation. Using simulation models in this step also the development of ethnic and social segregation shall predicted on the basis of empirically found determinants of relocations in a regionally comparative manner.


Contact:
Prof. (pens.) Dr. Johannes Huinink
SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 7
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-66360
E-Mail: huinink@uni-bremen.de

Prof. Dr. Michael Windzio
SOCIUM Research Center on Inequality and Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 9
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58629
E-Mail: mwindzio@uni-bremen.de