Movers and stayers. Household context and emigration from ...

The starting point for this study is 1890. The “cases” emigrated to North America in 1891
while the “controls” did not. To determine what influenced the decision on whether to move
or not a rather significant amount of information has been collected for every individual. This
has been done starting with the census 1890 and then by extracting data from church
records. The aim has been to track every individual back to their place of birth and the
family of origin. Mobility among young people in the countryside was still large during the
latter part of the 1800s and changing employments often also meant changing place of
residence. This has sometimes made the tracing rather complicated. The number of
observations in the study may seem rather limited in this first draft. This is due to the
extensive time required to locate each individual and to excerpt all necessary data.
2.3 The variables
The independent variables in this study can be divided into two groups. The first group
consists of variables that reflect the individual’s human capital. A general view within
migration research is that young unmarried people with no land of their own were the most
anxious to emigrate. They were considered to have had more to gain from migration than
other groups and less ties to the home country. The variables sex, age, marital status and
the individual´s own profession represent this.
The other group of variables reflects household structure and socioeconomic status. The
assumption here is that the propensity to emigrate was dependent on the parents’ social
status and the individual´s position in the family. This could for instance have an impact on
the future prospects to be able to stay on the family farm or in other ways being favored with
regard to inheritance. Variables representing such aspects are father’s occupation, whether
one or both parents were alive in1890, and the number of older siblings alive in 1890.
The importance of previous emigration for emigration rates is well known, and lots of
emigrants in the latter part of the 1800s travelled with prepaid tickets or had received crucial
information from previous emigrants to “the New World”. Therefore, the final variable
captures the family history of previous migration, i.e. the existence of previously migrated
siblings or parents.
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