ABSTRACT
Some of the earliest investigations in the field of psychiatric epidemiology included a major interest in the association between residential instability, migration, and mental illness (Malzberg 1940; Odegaard 1932; Tietze et al. 1942). It has also long been known that there are mental health risks associated with refugee status, and the effects of separation of young children from their parents have been investigated consistently from the earliest studies of child psychiatric epidemiology. However, there has been relatively little investigation of the potential mental health risk to children associated with the more ordinary residential relocations of families. Yet residential mobility of individual family units is actually normative in some contemporary societies, as in the United States, where about half of all children in middle to late childhood have moved one or more times in a five-year period, and about 20 per cent in any given year. Although residential mobility rates are not increasing, this pattern is now an established part of American family life. As the problem of a shortage of low-income housing has become acute, both in the United States and in many European countries, it is increasingly important to understand the effects of residential instability on children, so that problems associated with this aspect of family homelessness can be estimated.
