Compare methods

	Residential Mobility Biography	Life-Course Event History of Migration
Field	Migration Studies	Migration Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Survival analysis
Year of origin	1993	1990
Originator	Clara Mulder; Daniel Courgeau	Daniel Courgeau; Hill Kulu & Nadja Milewski
Type	Retrospective biographical data-collection and trajectory-reconstruction pipeline	Multi-state, multi-episode event-history model of interdependent life-course processes
Seminal source	Mulder, C. H. (1993). Migration Dynamics: A Life Course Approach. Thesis Publishers, Amsterdam. ISBN: 9789051701814	Kulu, H., & Milewski, N. (2007). Family Change and Migration in the Life Course: An Introduction. Demographic Research, 17, 567-590.
Aliases	Housing History Reconstruction, Retrospective Residential Calendar, Life-Course Housing Biography, Residential Trajectory Mapping	Multi-State Migration Event History, Interdependent Processes Migration Model, Parallel-Careers Hazard Analysis, Simultaneous-Equations Event History of Migration
Related	3	3
Summary	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.	Life-course event-history analysis treats migration not as an isolated event but as one thread in a web of parallel biographies — partnership, childbearing, education, and employment — that unfold together and influence one another over a lifetime. Building on Daniel Courgeau's program of analyzing migration alongside family and career and on Kulu and Milewski's synthesis of family change and migration, the approach models several multi-state, multi-episode processes at once and asks how transitions in one career trigger or delay moves in another. Methodologically it generalizes the single-event hazard model in three ways: it allows repeated episodes (people move more than once and pass through many states), it lets the current states of parallel processes enter as time-varying causes of migration, and, in its most demanding form, it estimates the processes jointly as a simultaneous-equations system with correlated unobserved heterogeneity to separate genuine causal interdependence from shared selection. The payoff is a model of migration that respects its embeddedness in the rest of the life course.