Wednesday, February 4 2026, 3 - 4:30pm Punaro Room / Baldwin Hall 480 Join UGA Sociology as we welcome Dr. Amy Spring (Georgia State University) for her presentation of: Moving with Family in Mind: Kinship and U.S. Mobility Family is an enduring force in American life and factors prominently into migration and settlement patterns. This presentation explores key themes from my research using a novel multigenerational kinship database derived from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which has followed families and their descendants since 1968. Leveraging this rare design, I examine how family networks shape residential mobility across the life course. I demonstrate that kin motivate both short- and long-distance moves, that proximity to relatives deters out-migration while attracting in-migration, and that family-driven moves cluster around key life stages and events. These dynamics vary by race, class, and gender, and help explain disparities in mobility out of high-poverty and disaster-prone areas. Together, my findings demonstrate the multifaceted influence of family ties on residential mobility and suggest that housing-mobility interventions and place-based community development initiatives will be more effective if they explicitly incorporate kinship considerations. Biography Dr. Spring is a demographer and urban sociologist whose research centers on families, communities, neighborhoods, and the environment. She joined the Sociology Department in 2015 after completing her Ph.D. from the University of Washington and a research fellowship at UW’s Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology. She is particularly interested in studying residential mobility and internal migration within the context of family networks. She is also interested in the geography of family networks and in family support systems over the life course. Her findings show that family networks are very influential in determining who moves and explaining racial/ethnic disparities in residential mobility. Further, she finds that familial locations play a key role in residential mobility following divorce, health problems, and other adverse life events. Her research also explores residential mobility and neighborhood context among sub-groups, including older adults, multiracial couples, and same-sex households, highlighting how residential experiences intersect with social statuses and identities. In current projects, she is investigating the geography of family networks for older adults with disabilities, and the influence of family locations on migration following climate-induced natural disasters. Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Dr. Spring is a faculty affiliate in the Urban Studies Institute and the Gerontology Institute at Georgia State University. She also serves on the editorial board of City & Community and Demography. Dr. Spring teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in urban sociology, environmental sociology, sociology of neighborhoods, statistics, and research methods. (credit: https://cas.gsu.edu/profile/amy-spring/) Type of Event: Colloquia
