Analyses on movers using the American Community Survey (ACS) are largely done at the person level, and treat the act of domestic migration as an individual event. Movers are treated as individual actors weighing the costs and benefits of moving (Massey 1988).  Some research, often driven by work on families and economic hardship (Ruggles 1987) focuses on moves at the household level, as though the household itself is discrete. Recent research has also looked at nonfamily migration (Mykyta and Macartney 2011) as well as competing decisions to move by multiple people in both family and non-family households (Steele, et al. 2013).

The decision to migrate does not operate just on the individual or the household level; but both. The result is that people move for different reasons and at different times, and result in households that can consist of a combination of individuals that have or have not moved in the last year.

This analysis specifically addresses what we know about the characteristics of households that not only have both movers and nonmovers, but may have multiple movers that consolidated into a household from different geographic origins.