Moving for the Kids, and the consequences for residential segregation. The perceived quality of schools and neighborhoods as determinants of residential mobility of families with and without migration heritage

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Michael Windzio, since 10/2018
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2016 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 318053447

>Moving for the kids< - residential relocations of families can be motivated by improving context conditions of the development and the socialisation of children. Using regionally comparative data we investigate how the perceived quality of schools and neighbourhoods - besides other determinants - affects residential locations and internal mobility of families with and without migration heritage. It will be the first study in Germany which systematically analyses whether motives of intergenerational transmission of socio-economic and educational status, but also the preservation of ethnic-cultural capital in the neighbourhood, trigger small-distance residential relocations. These relocations can either increase levels of ethnic residential segregation (>white flight<), or reduce them (>spatial assimilation<). At the same time, both processes influence levels of socio-economic segregation. The project makes a contribution to the analysis of determinants of small distance residential relocations of families with and without migration heritage in Germany. However, it enhances existing studies by focusing on the important factor of parental motive of reproducing the educational and socio-economic status. We assume that young middle-class couples and families take contexts characteristics of neighbourhoods and schools into account when they decide about their residential location. Thereby, it is basically the perceived quality of the local school and the neighbourhood, and the assumed consequences for children's educational and developmental perspectives. Contexts characteristics such as how poverty rates and high concentrations of immigrants in the neighbourhood and the school are perceived as >push< factors. In addition, we assume that families with a migration heritage orientate there decision also towards the opportunity to preserve their aptness cultural capital, which could possibly countervail the effect of educational motives. In the first step of the project we analyse if and how strongly motives of intergenerational transmission of educational status - also in combination with bundled benefits and other motives - influence the evaluation of contexts characteristics of schools and neighbourhoods. Furthermore, we analyse whether families with and without migration heritage differ with regard to these motives, and also whether these motives trigger migration intentions and migration decisions in both groups. In a second step we analyse the impact of the aggregation of microlevel decisions on social structures of segregation at the macro-level. Using agent-based models of simulation, we supply our simulation models with the empirical information from our estimated models and thereby estimate and predict basic trends of ethnic and social segregation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Johannes Huinink, until 10/2018