RESEARCH ARTICLE Open AccessParent-child proximity and personality:basic human values and moving distanceStefan Stieger 1,2* and David Lewetz 1AbstractBackground: An important event in many young people’s lives is moving out of the parental home. This event isoften operationalized as the distance between parents and their children, i.e., parent-child proximity.Methods: The present study (N= 1,451) analyzed correlates of parent-child proximity through the lens of humanvalue theory (Schwartz, Advances in experimental social psychology, 1992). Besides a classical proximity measure (i.e., parent-child), we also calculated the distance between childhood and current place of residence (i.e.,childhood-now), as well as parent-childhood proximity (distance between children’s childhood place of residenceand the current place of residence of parents), which acts as a control group because this distance is mostprobably chosen by the parents.Results: As hypothesized, we found that participants valuing universalism and self-direction as important (i.e.,associated with growth and anxiety-freedom) moved further away from the place where their parents live and theplace where they grew up than participants valuing self-protection and anxiety-avoidance (e.g., tradition, security,conformity).Conclusions: This study not only adds to research on psychological motivations to move, it endorses value theoryas being a useful lens through which to analyze migration behavior.Keywords: Basic human values, Parent-child proximity, Value theory, Dominance analysisBackgroundMigration – stimulated by globalization – is increasinglyemerging as an important sphere of societal and civicinterest. But moving from one place to another has al-ways naturally occurred, typified by when children leavetheir homes for work or to set up families of their own[27]. This behavior has fallen under the umbrella topicof parent-child proximity (e.g., [15, 19, 23, 39]).Research about parent-child proximity has analyzedsociocultural aspects, such as through an examination offamily bonds that are assumed to be tighter in southernregions of Europe than northern regions (e.g., [29]).Moreover, demographic aspects, such as sex, age, maritalstatus, education, or family size (for a discussion, see[16]), as well as socioeconomic aspects such as financialsupport through the family [39] and geographicalaspects such as the attractiveness of places [1], have allbeen frequently studied. Besides these sociological,demographic, economic, and environmental studies, psy-chological research has also examined determinants ofthe decision to change one’s residence.For example, Jokela et al. [18] analyzed temperamenttraits (i.e., emotionality, sociability, and activity) in alarge prospective study in Finland. They found that more(vs. less) sociable individuals had greater moving dis-tances and were more likely to move to urban (vs. rural)areas. Furthermore, individuals high (vs. low) in the tem-perament trait of emotionality had decreased movingdistance, but an increased likelihood of leaving the par-ental home. The Big Five personality traits have alsobeen analyzed in terms of moving behaviors. It has beenfound that men (but not women) higher in neuroticismand extraversion were more likely to move [35]. In short,past research has found that moving decisions are notonly influenced by demographic aspects (e.g., education),sociological aspects (e.g., family bonds), genetic* Correspondence: stefan.stieger@univie.ac.at; stefan.stieger@uni-konstanz.de1 Department of Basic Psychological Research and Research Methods, Schoolof Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria2 Research Methods, Assessment, and iScience, Department of Psychology,University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany© 2016 Stieger and Lewetz. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, andreproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link tothe Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver(http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.Stieger and Lewetz BMC Psychology (2016) 4:26 DOI 10.1186/s40359-016-0132-5
