The author presents evidence of a relationship between household employment structure and relative rates of mobility. She draws on Census of Population data for 1981 and 1991 from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study and cross-sectional Sample of Anonymised Records microdata for 1991. These data are used to demonstrate the shifts in household employment composition, by region, for a subpopulation of ‘nuclear family’ households. The results indicate that households with more than one earner demonstrate a lower propensity to be spatially mobile than do ‘traditional’ male-breadwinner households. The implication is that differential opportunities and constraints, which are conferred by residential location and all forms of mobility—residential, occupational, and sociospatial—operate, at least in part, as a function of household employment structure and the evolution of household structure across both time (the life course) and space (home and work locations). The author opens up the analysis of Census of Population data to issues both of intrahousehold and of inter-household mobility as a means of sensitising migration research to issues which call for further in-depth qualitative investigation.
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