ABSTRACT
Social ties have been dealt with in both the sociologically and anthropologically oriented literature on migration. Social ties are the essence of traditional peasant societies like that of the contemporary rural wet zone Sri Lanka. The development strategy employed by Sri Lanka has emphasized the creation of an attractive rural destination for potential migrants in which the explicit accent on agricultural work would result in the socioeconomic development of the nation as well as of the individuals and families concerned. Indicators of personal characteristics, changing land relationships, housing, and income as well as changing social ties portray the broad transformations associated with rural-rural migration. The general expectation was that since migrants were selected from the less well-off segments of the society, they would also be characterized by inferior housing conditions. The general conclusion supported by the bi-variate and multivariate analyses is that the lower the level of integration into communal activity, the higher the propensity to migrate.
