Residential experience and residential environment choice over the life-course

The study reported in this article answers the question: how does experience with a certain type of residential environment contribute to the explanation of residential environment choice? The issues under investigation are whether residential experience with cities, suburbs and rural areas increases the probability of return migration and whether residential experience increases the probability of moving to other places with the same type of residential environment. The probability of moving to a city, suburb or rural area is investigated by applying multinomial logistic regression on a retrospective dataset of life-courses of more than 3000 Netherlands respondents. The results indicate that city experience and suburb experience only increase the probability of return migration, whereas rural experience also increases the probability of moving to another rural area.