Explore Indicators
Migration intentions
What is the indicator?
This indicator asks residents of a community about their migration intentions – whether they are planning to keep living in a community, if they are intending to to shift to a new community in the near future, or if they ‘would if they could’. This can be done using several questions, with two included every year in the annual Regional Wellbeing Survey. Migration intentions do not always translate into action – not everyone who wants to migrate will do so, or is able to do so. However, they do provide an indicator that is future looking: whereas data on actual population change looks backwards, understanding migration intentions can help in identifying where people have concerns about the liveability of their concerns, and to predict likely levels of future outmigration from a community.
What can this tell us about wellbeing?
Wanting to shift to a different community is something that typically occurs when a person isn’t able to fulfil their wellbeing needs in the community they currently live in. If a high proportion of the population have a desire or intent to migrate elsewhere, this suggests the community has low liveability, and is not able to provide one or more of the many things residents need to have a decent quality of life. The factors driving high migration intentions can vary: for example, high desire to migrate may be a result of low living cost affordability, lack of job opportunities, concerns about crime and safety, or difficulty accessing health or education services, to name a few. This indicator provides a warning sign of potentially declining liveability that has reached a point where it is affecting desire to continue living in the community.
Advantages and disadvantages of this indicator
Advantages: Understanding migration intention provides early insight into potential future changes in population of a community, and warning signals of declining liveability.
Disadvantages: This indicator does not identify what is causing change in migration intentions, and other wellbeing indicators need to be examined to understand what is driving an increase or decrease in migration intentions. As not all people who want to migrate will actually shift, it is not possible to accurately predict likely future population change from this indicator alone, although it can provide a guide to whether outmigration may increase.
What measures should I used for this indicator?
Migration intentions are measured via community surveys. Currently, migration intention data for rural regions is available from the annual Regional Wellbeing Survey (RWS), with two measures published annually in data tables. It is also possible to ask questions in your own survey about migration intentions.
Measures
The Regional Wellbeing Survey includes a number of questions measuring migration intentions. Two of these are published annually in data tables and the Regional Wellbeing Dashboard. Data are published for Australia, states and territories, regional Australia, and a range of geographic regions. The smallest scale at which data are available is the local government area (LGA), although sample sizes are too small to report data for some smaller population LGAs in rural Australia. Where this is the case, findings are published for a larger region that includes that LGA.
You can use migration intentions measures from the Regional Wellbeing Survey in a number of ways:
- Directly source data about your community or region from the results published each year in data tables and the Regional Wellbeing Dashboard
- Include the same questions in your own survey, and draw on Regional Wellbeing Survey data to provide comparison data that enables you to assess how your community is going compared to others of similar size, or to the average for regional areas in your state/territory, or across regional Australia, urban Australia, or Australia as a whole
- Include additional questions asking residents what is driving their desire to stay or go from the community, such as selecting whether a desire to migrate is due to employment issues, availability of services, education, safety concerns, or other factors.
In general, interpretation of these indicators is relatively simple – an increase in desire to continue living in the community suggests it is providing the conditions that support wellbeing, while an increase in the proportion of residents wanting to migrate is an indicator the community may no longer be supporting as high a quality of life for its residents as it did previously.
The primary data source available for this indicator is the Regional Wellbeing Survey. Data are updated annually, and available in two formats: data tables, and the Regional Wellbeing Dashboard. The questions included in the Regional Wellbeing Survey are described below. In addition to these questions, it is possible to ask residents who want to leave the community to identify why they want to leave, which can pinpoint where investment and action is needed to improve the ability of the local community to support a high quality of life for all residents.
| Question/item | Response options |
| If I could I would shift to live in another community | 7 point scale from 1 (Strongly disagree) to 7 (Strongly agree), with a ‘Don’t know’ option also provided |
| How likely are you to shift to a new community in the next 12 months? | 5 point scale from 1 (Very unlilkely) to 5 (Very likely), with a ‘Don’t know’ option also provided |
This measure can be included in your own survey. You can replicate questions used in the Regional Wellbeing Survey, or design your own that are focused on the specific factors that may be causing high likelihood of migration.