ABSTRACT
A regional analysis was chosen for two reasons. First, because in Spain we find many regional variations in leaving home patterns. Second, given the small-n problem of a two-country study, a regional comparison was chosen to study the role of context effects such as social norms and housing conditions on social independence, since they cannot be studied at the individual level with the given data. Not only the regional context is taken into account but also the rural-urban context differences. Regional differences in staying home rates can be due to composition effects, for instance, if in a region a social class whose children tend to leave home early is over-represented. Regional differences in staying home rates for Spanish people enrolled in education are very low, 4 standard deviation for men and women and average rates of 90.9 and 89.5 per cent respectively.
