Compare methods

	Residential Mobility Biography	Survival Analysis of First Migration
Field	Migration Studies	Migration Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Survival analysis
Year of origin	1993	1993
Originator	Clara Mulder; Daniel Courgeau	Hans-Peter Blossfeld & Götz Rohwer; Clara Mulder
Type	Retrospective biographical data-collection and trajectory-reconstruction pipeline	Continuous-time hazard model of the first migration event
Seminal source	Mulder, C. H. (1993). Migration Dynamics: A Life Course Approach. Thesis Publishers, Amsterdam. ISBN: 9789051701814	Blossfeld, H.-P., & Rohwer, G. (2002). Techniques of Event History Modeling: New Approaches to Causal Analysis (2nd ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum. ISBN: 9780805840919
Aliases	Housing History Reconstruction, Retrospective Residential Calendar, Life-Course Housing Biography, Residential Trajectory Mapping	Hazard Model of First Move, Time-to-First-Migration Analysis, Age-at-First-Migration Survival Model, First-Move Event-History Analysis
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.	Survival analysis of first migration treats the move out of one's place of origin as a timed event and asks not whether but when a person first migrates. Rather than modeling a binary 'migrated or not' outcome, it follows individuals from the moment they become at risk and models the instantaneous hazard of a first move as a function of age and changing life circumstances. The approach, codified for the social sciences by Blossfeld and Rohwer's event-history framework and applied to migration biographies by Clara Mulder, handles the two features that defeat ordinary regression: censoring, because most people in a sample have not yet migrated when observed, and time-varying covariates, because the things that trigger a move — finishing school, finding a job, forming a union — themselves change over time. The result is an estimate of how the risk of a first move rises and falls across the life course and how it responds to time-dependent conditions. It can be fitted nonparametrically with a Cox model or with a parametric baseline when the shape of age dependence is of interest.