Emotional Attachment, Residential Satisfaction, and Mobility Propensity

Drawing on J. Wolpert’s stress-threshold notion, Speare and his associates have proposed a mobility decision-making model in which residential satisfaction serves as a mediating variable between back-ground characteristics and mobility propensity and behavior. Several studies have employed this residential satisfaction model to further examine mobility desire, expectation, adjustment, and behavior. There is no consensus, however, about the intervening role of residential satisfaction in the mobility decision-making process. With respect to background variables, few have taken into account the influence of sentiment or emotional attachment on mobility decision making. This study attempts to examine the intervening effect of residential satisfac-tion on mobility propensity in Taiwan by using an island-wide sample. The following research questions are addressed: (1) To what extent and how does residential satisfaction mediate the effects of backgroun