Residential Mobility Biography

A move count is a single number stripped of timing, context, and meaning; a residential mobility biography is the full dated sequence of dwellings with their attributes and the life events attached to each move. The biography lets you see when each move happened, how far it was, whether it was a step up or down the housing ladder, and what triggered it, none of which a count can show. It is collected on a multi-domain life-history calendar precisely so that recall is supported and moves can be anchored to other life events. The count is an impoverished summary of what the biography records in full.

Because the calendar collects residence alongside partnership, work, and fertility on a shared time grid, which both improves recall and lets uncertain dates be reconciled against landmark events. Courgeau's life-course logic is that moves derive their meaning from these parallel careers, so collecting them together is substantive, not just ergonomic. The visual alignment helps respondents place vague memories ('we moved right after the wedding') and helps the analyst catch gaps and overlaps. A bare address list invites omissions and dating errors that the calendar is specifically designed to prevent.

Primarily it is a data-collection and trajectory-description pipeline. Its job is to produce clean, complete, dated residential histories and to describe them as sequences, not to estimate parameters. That said, it is the indispensable front end for statistical analysis: the dated dwelling spells it yields are exactly what survival and event-history models of move timing consume, and the trajectories it builds are the objects that sequence-analysis techniques compare. Mulder's work shows the pipeline and the modeling working in tandem, with the biography supplying the structured input the hazard models require.