Does Loneliness Drive Emigration? Prospective Evidence from Sweden and the Netherlands

Thijs van den Broek , Erasmus School of Health Policy & Management

The well-established finding that migrants tend to be lonelier than their counterparts without a migration background in the country of settlement is typically ascribed to challenges that come with migration. The premise of the current study is that high levels of loneliness among migrants may, in part, also reflect selection of lonely people into migration. This hypothesis is tested using Wave 1 Swedish Generations and Gender Survey data enriched with population register data on emigration (n=7,074). With this combination of data, respondents’ emigration behavior can be monitored prospectively over a period of approximately four years and regressed on their loneliness scores at baseline and a range of potential confounders. Results of logistic regression analyses indicate that people who were lonely, as indicted by a 2+ score on the shortened De Jong Gierveld loneliness scale, were 2.6 times more likely than their non-lonely counterparts to emigrate in the observed period. No significant differences were found between people who were moderately lonely and people who were severely lonely. These findings provide initial evidence of a “lonely migrant effect”. When interpreting loneliness differences between migrants and non-migrants, scholars should consider that relatively many migrants may already have been lonely prior to migration. In addition to results from this relatively small Swedish study, I intend to present results from a larger study on emigration from the Netherlands.

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 Presented in Session 63. Family and Social Ties of Migrants