Determinants of women’s migration in Turkey

Ayse Abbasoglu-Ozgoren, Hacettepe University
Mehmet Ali Eryurt, Hacettepe University
Ismet Koc, Hacettepe University

Women’s internal migration in the developing world has been rarely studied before last two decades, mainly due to lack of data and its dynamics different from men’s internal migration in general. In Turkey, the situation has not been different from the rest of the developing world. Women are more likely to move due to marriage and familial reasons making it more “associational”. The aim of this paper is to examine the determinants of internal migration of ever-married women in Turkey. In the study, transitions to first and second migrations are studied separately since the reasons that underlie first and subsequent migrations differ. This paper makes use of migration history data of ever-married women, which were collected for the first time in TDHS-2008. The method of analyses is event history analysis, specifically piecewise constant proportional hazard regression model. Differentiating between urban and rural residence of origin/destination is crucial since the dynamics and reasons of migrations differentiate across these flows. Therefore we control for type of place of residence of origin and destination, which will allow us to measure the impact of push and pull factors on probability to migrate. To the best of authors’ knowledge, no event history analysis on timing and patterns of female migration in Turkey has been carried out. This paper will attempt to fill this gap in the literature by employing event-history analysis to analyze the impact of various motives on first and second migrations of women in Turkey taking into account both time-varying and time-constant variables.