ABSTRACT
Residential migration can be a highly disruptive process for all of those involved, particularly in moves involving considerable distance. It disrupts and fragments a household’s social space, forcing changes in patterns of work and social life. This disruption also involves housing considerations, with the majority of migration in the United Kingdom seeing households moving into, within or out of home ownership. This is because the United Kingdom housing market is characterized by a very high proportion of home owners, around 70 per cent of households. Both residential relocation decisions and housing search are intrinsically tied to the household, how it functions as a decision-making unit and the weighting of power relations within it. The process of migration and the buying and selling of a property can be described as one of the most stressful events in a household’s life experience. Place this within the context of the recent slump in house prices-the United Kingdom housing market is highly cyclical in nature-and this stress can increase tenfold. Not only does migration now involve the expenditure of considerable amounts of money, the majority of which is usually borrowed, but it is the exchange of private space. It is a construction of bricks and mortar that has been imbued with a sense of place that is intensely personal and has become everincreasingly private as households have moved away from public renting. As such, moving house, particularly for home owners, is an immensely important operation involving serious amounts of debate and discussion for most couples before eventually reaching a decision to move and to buy a given property. This chapter therefore argues that to understand the decision-making processes involved in residential relocation and housing search it is necessary to consider the roles played and the power relations that make up the household unit. It presents some of the findings from a detailed study of joint decision making in housing migration, based on the findings from a small sample of couples who have recently moved house in two rural districts of lowland England.
