{"title":"Variations in Access to Social Support: the Effects of Residential Mobility and Spatial Proximity to Kin and Family","authors":"Kyra Hagge, Diana Schacht","doi":"10.1007/s11205-023-03280-w","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Increasing residential mobility is said to challenge existing social support systems as mobility raises geographic distances between family members. Since family social support is essential for health and well-being, this study investigates whether residential mobility affects familial social support following changes in proximity to family and kin. By applying a stepwise linear regression on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel study, this paper is looking at variations between different residential mobility trajectories regarding social support provision and spatial proximity to family members in Germany over a 10-year period. Our findings show that people who are moving within Germany are receiving significantly more social support from their family and kin, while internationally mobile respondents receive less compared to non-mobile people. Mediation analyses show that proximity to family and kin are accounting for the negative effect of international mobility on social support but cannot explain the positive effect of internal migration.</p>","PeriodicalId":21943,"journal":{"name":"Social Indicators Research","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.8000,"publicationDate":"2024-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Social Indicators Research","FirstCategoryId":"90","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-023-03280-w","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"SOCIAL SCIENCES, INTERDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Increasing residential mobility is said to challenge existing social support systems as mobility raises geographic distances between family members. Since family social support is essential for health and well-being, this study investigates whether residential mobility affects familial social support following changes in proximity to family and kin. By applying a stepwise linear regression on data from the German Socio-Economic Panel study, this paper is looking at variations between different residential mobility trajectories regarding social support provision and spatial proximity to family members in Germany over a 10-year period. Our findings show that people who are moving within Germany are receiving significantly more social support from their family and kin, while internationally mobile respondents receive less compared to non-mobile people. Mediation analyses show that proximity to family and kin are accounting for the negative effect of international mobility on social support but cannot explain the positive effect of internal migration.
期刊介绍:
Since its foundation in 1974, Social Indicators Research has become the leading journal on problems related to the measurement of all aspects of the quality of life. The journal continues to publish results of research on all aspects of the quality of life and includes studies that reflect developments in the field. It devotes special attention to studies on such topics as sustainability of quality of life, sustainable development, and the relationship between quality of life and sustainability. The topics represented in the journal cover and involve a variety of segmentations, such as social groups, spatial and temporal coordinates, population composition, and life domains. The journal presents empirical, philosophical and methodological studies that cover the entire spectrum of society and are devoted to giving evidences through indicators. It considers indicators in their different typologies, and gives special attention to indicators that are able to meet the need of understanding social realities and phenomena that are increasingly more complex, interrelated, interacted and dynamical. In addition, it presents studies aimed at defining new approaches in constructing indicators.