When it comes to leaving home, what factors play a role in determining decisions of young adults? Where do social forces, such as social class, age, gender, and ethnicity feature into decision making processes? In this article, the author’s explore these questions in the context of young immigrants in Canada.
Check out the abstract below, and then click through to the main article to learn more:
“Leaving Home Ain’t Easy:” The timing and pathways of young immigrants’ home-leaving transitions
Peer-reviewed research by: Michael Haan, Wanyun Cheng and Zhou Yu
Leaving the parental home to live independently has long been a marker of one’s transition to adulthood and a sign of immigrant adaptation to the host country. The timing and pathways of home-leaving are important for both the housing trajectories of young adults and the overall housing demand of immigrant receiving areas. However, young adults—immigrants or not— have increasingly been delaying this transition, opting instead to stay in the parental home for an extended period of time. In this paper, we conceptualize home-leaving as a decision made over time—influenced by individual, family, and contextual factors—and use panel data collected in the 2011 and 2017 Canadian General Social Survey (GSS). Through both a Cox proportional hazard model and a competing risk model, we examine the timing of exit from the parental home, the determinants of this exit, and the variable rates of independent household formation across immigrant, non-visible, and visible minority groups. We find, although the relationship is not always linear, generational status, as well as race and ethnicity, play an important role in not only the timing, but also the destination of home leaving, while age at arrival is particularly salient for racialized immigrant groups. Young immigrants of visible minority background are generally less likely to leave their parental home, even though immigrants to Canada are selected for their ability to succeed in Canada.
Click here to read the full open-access article, published in 2023 in the journal Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie.
Full Reference //
Haan, M., Cheng, W., & Yu, Z. (2023) “Leaving Home Ain’t Easy:” The Timing and Pathways of Young Immigrants’ Home-Leaving Transitions. Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 60, 276–301.
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