Stepwise Migration Analysis

Stepwise migration analysis examines whether migrants reach their eventual destination in a single leap or by climbing the settlement hierarchy in stages — village to town, town to regional city, city to metropolis. The idea traces to Ravenstein's nineteenth-century 'laws of migration,' but it was David Conway who, in his 1980 International Migration Review article, clarified what the step-wise mechanism actually claims and how it should be studied, arguing that researchers must reconstruct the sequence of moves and identify the conditions prompting each step rather than merely observing that migrants end up in big cities. The analysis is fundamentally a research-design and sequencing exercise: places are ranked on a settlement hierarchy, individuals' migration histories are turned into trajectories of ranks, and those trajectories are classified as genuinely step-wise progressions or as direct moves that skip levels. Explaining why a migrant takes the next step upward draws on the broader migration mechanisms synthesized by Massey and colleagues in 1993 — information, social networks, accumulated resources, and opportunity structures — which together determine whether a stay at one rung is a stepping stone to the next. The framework remains the standard lens for studying staged rural-to-urban and internal migration.