Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2005. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 142-143).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 1987. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 514-526).

As residential mobility recursively links individual life courses and the characteristics of places, it is unsurprising that geographers have long sought to understand how people make moving decisions. However, much of our knowledge of residential mobility processes derives from cross-sectional analyses of either mobility decision-making or moving events. Comparatively few studies have linked these separate literatures by analysing how residential (im)mobility decisions unfold over time within particular biographical, household and spatio-temporal contexts. This is problematic, as life course theories suggest that people frequently do not act in accordance with their underlying moving desires. To evaluate the extent to which residential (im)mobility is volitional or the product of constraints therefore requires a longitudinal approach linking moving desires to subsequent moving behaviour. This thesis develops this longitudinal perspective through four linked empirical studies, which each use British Household Panel Survey data to analyse how the life course context affects the expression and realisation of moving desires. The first study investigates how people make moving decisions in different ways in response to different motivations, triggers and life events. The second study harnesses the concept of ‘linked lives', exploring the extent to which the likelihood of realising a desire to move is dependent upon the desires of a person's partner. The third study analyses the biographical dimension of mobility decision-making, investigating how the long-term trajectories of life course careers are associated with particular mobility biographies. The final empirical chapter develops these insights, exploring the duration and abandonment of moving desires. Taken together, these studies test and extend conceptual models of mobility decision-making by empirically engaging with neglected facets of life course theories. Fundamentally, the thesis uncovers how aggregate mobility patterns are produced by the interactions between individual choices and multi-scalar constraints.

Research at the site of San Estevan, Belize begins with the premise that more serious attention must be paid to the significance of residential variability in archaeological modelings of the lowland Maya. A classification of structure groupings is used to track the distribution of San Estevan's diverse residential arrangements across the site. Norms of social structure and economic inequality prove inadequate frameworks to account for the spatial and temporal variation manifest by San Estevan's residential classes, nor do they help to explain the spatial regularities underlying the distributions of these classes. I suggest, instead, that the site's residential units best effect divergent organizational strategies adopted by San Estevan's prehispanic domestic groups. Whereas diffuse political authority, impoverished political economies, and kingroup self-sufficiency traditionally have been invoked to account for Maya residential patterns, domestic strategies at San Estevan gained their shape directly in relation to the functions housed in the community's precincts of monumental architecture. I conclude that prehispanic Maya residential distributions formed through stringent economic and political entailments of community life.

In many spatial epidemiologic studies, investigators use residential location at diagnosis as a surrogate for unknown environmental exposures or as a geographic basis for assigning measured exposures. Inherently, they make assumptions about the timing and location of pertinent exposures which may prove problematic when studying long latency diseases such as cancer. In this work we explored how the association between environmental exposures and disease risk for long-latency health outcomes like cancer is affected by residential mobility. We used simulation studies conditioned on real data to evaluate the extent to which the commonly held assumption of no residential mobility 1) affected the ability of generalized additive models to detect areas of significantly elevated historic environmental exposure and 2) increased bias in the estimates of the relationship between environmental exposures and disease in a case-control study. While the literature suggests that some researchers have begun to develop methods to incorporate historic locations in studies of health outcomes, a number of questions remain. One reason for the knowledge gap is that residential histories have not been collected in most U.S. epidemiologic studies. In our work we evaluated the impact of using public-record database generated histories to estimate the effects of exposure in lieu of using subject-reported addresses collected during a study. Finally, we evaluated the effect of environmental exposure on cancer risk in a case-control study using an approach that combined a multiple membership conditional autoregressive (CAR) model with an environmental exposure index for temporally correlated time-varying exposure assigned based on residential histories. We used this model in a data application to explain bladder cancer risk in the New England Bladder Cancer Study. We included a temporal arsenic exposure index in the model to assess a large number of correlated arsenic exposures.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 235-243).

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Thesis (M.A.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Geography, 1998? / Errata slip inserted. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 282-298).