Partner (dis)agreement on moving desires and the subsequent moving behaviour of couples

Rory Coulter, University of St Andrews
Maarten van Ham, Delft University of Technology
Peteke Feijten, The Netherlands Institute for Social Research

Residential mobility decisions are known to be made at the household level. However, most empirical analyses of residential mobility relate moving behaviour to the housing and neighbourhood satisfaction and pre-move thoughts of individuals. If partners in a couple do not share evaluations of dwelling or neighbourhood quality or do not agree on whether moving is (un)desirable, ignoring these disagreements will lead to an inaccurate assessment of the strength of the links between moving desires and actual moves. This study is one of the first to investigate disagreements in moving desires between partners and the subsequent consequences of such disagreements for moving behaviour. Drawing on British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) data, we find that disagreement about the desirability of moving is most likely where partners also disagree about the quality of their dwelling or neighbourhood. Panel logistic regression models show that the moving desires of both partners interact to affect the moving behaviour of couples. Only 7.6% of couples move if only the man desires to move, whereas 20.1% of shared moving desires lead to a subsequent move.