Residential Mobility Biography

A residential mobility biography is the reconstructed, dated record of every place a person has lived, gathered so that the full arc of their housing career can be analyzed against the rest of their life. The method, central to Clara Mulder's life-course study of migration dynamics and to Daniel Courgeau's program linking migration to family and career, is primarily a data-collection and trajectory-description pipeline rather than a statistical estimator: it specifies how to elicit complete dwelling histories through retrospective interviews and life-history calendars, how to verify and date them, and how to describe the resulting sequence of moves. Each move is coded with its distance, the change in housing tenure or type it involved, and the life-course event that accompanied it, so the biography becomes a structured sequence ready for sequence analysis or for feeding into event-history models. The aim is a clean, gap-free residential trajectory in which every move is anchored in time and meaning.