Itchy feet

There would be 30% of inhabitants on the Gold Coast of Australia who have been contemplating to migrate (data from 1998) and there would be up to 50% of UK residents also contemplating migration, according to BBC (data 2004). In most cases, they will stay home - however you can tell from such data that a lot of us have 'itchy feet': sedentary people wonder if they should leave or not, and for migrants this question comes back regularly.

There is very little in the scientific literature regarding what happens to migrants before their first departure! It would be important to know more, because this could enable us to predict if their migration will be successful, if they will live happily abroad or if it will be an unbearable strain on them, on their family, their spouse, their children, their health, their career, their well-being and their integration in the new culture and new environment.

A recent publication by Tabor & Milfont (2010) proposes to explore this issue. The authors use a theoretical model of change from another research field: how people decide to go out of maladaptative behaviors. They analysed on-line public forums in which UK citizens consider moving to New Zeeland and discuss openly about issues, inform and support each other. This type of method is new and also quite limited: The authors can just observe spontaneous comments and the participants characteristics are totally unknown. I am not totally convinced that it's a relevant method to use actually. But you could argue that the records correspond to very spontaneous conversations that do not suffer from the issues of trying to give politically correct answers. So why not trying indeed.

The stages of migration would be: Precontemplation (not thinking yet about moving), contemplation (thinking about moving but without having yet taken the decision, getting information), preparation, action (actual departure from the home country), arrival in the new country and acculturation.

What happens before the departure then? A lot of research has shown already that migrants with certain personality traits adapt better than others _ this type of research is usually done after arrival though. The observation of the forum discussions show that migrants who give advise to people contemplating departure have experienced this already: It's important to have a strong desire to discover, be driven by seeking novelty, be adventurous, seeking new sensations, and be curious, i.e. intellectually open. If you have this type of personality, your desire to go away is probably quite strong. This 'push' force will help you cope better with the stress after arrival and will be stronger than fears and worries.

Openness to change and sensation seeking are personality traits and there is not much you can do to change it, you have it or not (see the article 'big five personality traits' on wikipedia if you're curious… but if you're already an international fellow, you probably are!).

I didn't learn much from the paper in terms of new findings, and found their data quite limited. But I really enjoyed the authors' attempt to construct a theoretical framework to explore at least various moments in the migration process and use it to explore systematically each moment and it's own challenges and influencing factors.

Source: AS Tabor & TL Milfont. 2010. Migration change model: exploring the process of migration on a psychological level. International Journal of Intercultural Relations. The authors work at the Center for Applied cross-cultural research, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.