Leaving the City: Counterurbanisation and Internal Return Migration in Sweden.

This paper examines counterurban migration among young families with children in Sweden and the extent to which these moves reflect return migration, recognising the role of family members and family roots at the destination from a life course perspective. Drawing on register data for all young families with children leaving the Swedish metropolitan areas during the years 2003-2013, we analyse the pattern of counterurban moves and explore how the families' socioeconomic characteristics, childhood origins, and links to family networks are associated with becoming a counterurban mover and choice of destination. The results show that four out of ten counterurban movers are former urban movers who choose to return to their home region. Among them, almost all have family at the destination, indicating that family ties are important for counterurban migration. In general, urban residents with a background outside metropolitan areas are much more likely to become counterurban movers. Families' previous residential experiences during childhood, particularly in rural areas, are found to be associated with the residential environment they choose to resettle in when leaving the big city. Counterurban movers making a return move are similar to other counterurban movers in relation to employment status, but tend to be better off economically and move longer distances than other counterurban movers.

Young Adults' Migration to Cities in Sweden: Do Siblings Pave the Way?

Young adult internal migration forms a large share of the influx of people into large cities in the developed world. We investigate the role of the residential locations of siblings for young adults' migration to large cities, using the case of Sweden and its four largest cities: Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö/Lund, and Uppsala. We use register data for the full Swedish-born population of young adults aged 18-28 living in Sweden in the years 2007-2013 and multinomial logistic regression analyses of migrating to each of the four cities or migrating elsewhere versus not migrating. Our point of departure is the paving-the-way hypothesis, which posits that young adults who have a sibling living at a migration destination are particularly likely to move to that destination, more so than to other destinations. Additional hypotheses are related to having more than one sibling in the city and to the gender of siblings living at the destination. We find support for the paving-the-way hypothesis and an additional effect for having more than one sibling in the city. Having a sibling of the same gender in a city matters more for moving there than having a sibling of the opposite gender.

A whole-genome sequenced control population in northern Sweden reveals subregional genetic differences.

The number of national reference populations that are whole-genome sequenced are rapidly increasing. Partly driving this development is the fact that genetic disease studies benefit from knowing the genetic variation typical for the geographical area of interest. A whole-genome sequenced Swedish national reference population (n = 1000) has been recently published but with few samples from northern Sweden. In the present study we have whole-genome sequenced a control population (n = 300) (ACpop) from Västerbotten County, a sparsely populated region in northern Sweden previously shown to be genetically different from southern Sweden. The aggregated variant frequencies within ACpop are publicly available (DOI 10.17044/NBIS/G000005) to function as a basic resource in clinical genetics and for genetic studies. Our analysis of ACpop, representing approximately 0.11% of the population in Västerbotten, indicates the presence of a genetic substructure within the county. Furthermore, a demographic analysis showed that the population from which samples were drawn was to a large extent geographically stationary, a finding that was corroborated in the genetic analysis down to the level of municipalities. Including ACpop in the reference population when imputing unknown variants in a Västerbotten cohort resulted in a strong increase in the number of high-confidence imputed variants (up to 81% for variants with minor allele frequency < 5%). ACpop was initially designed for cancer disease studies, but the genetic structure within the cohort will be of general interest for all genetic disease studies in northern Sweden.

Young adults' return migration from large cities in Sweden: The role of siblings and parents.

Living in cities affects young adults' access to education and work. With the use of register data for 2000-2013, we examined the role of having siblings and parents living close by and having siblings and parents living in the area of origin, in young adults' return migration from the four largest cities in Sweden. We found that young adults were less likely to return, and also less likely to migrate elsewhere, if they had siblings or parents living in the city of residence than if this was not the case. If the parents no longer lived in the region of origin, the young adults were very unlikely to return. Young adults were more likely to return if they had siblings living in that region than if they had no siblings or the siblings lived elsewhere. Adverse circumstances such as dropping out of tertiary education, low income, and unemployment were associated with a greater likelihood of return migration.

Is spatial mobility on the rise or in decline? An order-specific analysis of the migration of young adults in Sweden.

The aim of this study is to investigate spatial mobility over time. Research on 'new mobilities' suggests increasing movement of individuals, technology, and information. By contrast, studies of internal migration report declining spatial mobility in recent decades. Using longitudinal register data from Sweden, we calculate annual order-specific migration rates to investigate the spatial mobility of young adults over the last three decades. We standardize mobility rates for educational enrolment, educational level, family status, and place of residence to determine how much changes in individuals' life domains explain changes in mobility. Young adults' migration rates increased significantly in the 1990s; although all order-specific migration rates increased, first migration rates increased the most. Changes in population composition, particularly increased enrolment in higher education, accounted for much of the elevated spatial mobility in the 1990s. The analysis supports neither ever increasing mobility nor a long-term rise in rootedness among young adults in Sweden.

Migration and Regional Differences in Access to Local Family Networks Among 60-year olds in Sweden.

Regional variations in access to local family networks has implications for future care burdens in different regions as well as the living conditions for both older and younger generations. The geographical distance between family members is a long-term consequence of accumulated migration and non-migration undertaken by the individual as well as other family members. This study contributes to this subject through offering a description of regional disparities in the access to local family networks among 60-year olds in Sweden. Additionally, this paper aims to analyse this pattern as an outcome of long-distance migration processes. The empirical study is based on Swedish register data, with a focus on 60-year olds in Sweden, linking them to their adult children, siblings and parents as well as in-laws. The dataset includes total population, where it is possible to identify family networks in their geographical context on various geographic scales, down to a neighbourhood level. As expected, results indicate that families in metropolitan areas are the most concentrated geographically while the left behind parent, embedded in a local network in their own and older generation, is a small category in urban areas but quite common in some rural municipalities. It is also shown that access to local family networks not only varies on a broad rural-urban scale but also locally, between neighbourhoods within metropolitan areas.