ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses two issues: the effect of people's background characteristics and the key role played by major variables such as family, professional advancement, economics, and politics. We will show how key characteristics of our sample—such as their sex, age, class or family background, and city of origin—all can affect who does or does not stay, and why. We will also examine the key considerations that determine what choices these people make. Our analysis involved three stages: first we did bivariate analysis, looking to see if the relationship between background variables and the decision to return was significant. If that finding was not significant, we also looked to see if one background variable had a stronger effect than another for any of the seven groups discussed above. Finally, based on variables that appeared to have an important bivariate relationship, we built a model of the key variables that we believed most strongly affected people's overall decision on staying or returning. Using this latter technique, and employing a statistical method called logistic regression analysis, we evaluated the effect of all the key variables at the same time; this analysis and evaluation gives us a much more reliable and powerful explanation of what factors lead people to think of returning than does the simpler bivariate analysis. 1
