MESARAS - Migration and Personality

Core research questions

In addition to the general research question how university students' location choices are affected by personality, previous mobility experiences and geographic factors, I addressed the following specific research questions:

• • Contrasting application and enrolment choices - how does personality impact on the choice set formation process and geographic mobility within the university choice process?

  • To which extent do 'psychic' costs play a role in the study location choice and how does personality affect the valuation of location-specific conditions, such as amenities and prospective employment opportunities?

  • Integrating heterogeneous personalities and preferences into a compensating differential framework - what can be inferred regarding expected mobility premiums of prespective graduates entering the labour market? 

MESARAS 2013 survey: Mobility, Expectation, Self-Assessment, and Risk-Attitudes of Students

The MESARAS 2013 survey was conducted in October 2013 at the economics departments of seven adjacent universities in northern and middle Germany. More that 2,500 students from the following universities participated: 

• • Bielefeld University

  • Clausthal University of Technology

  • TU Dortmund University

  • Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg

  • Leibniz Universität Hannover

  • University of Muenster

  • Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg

These seven public universities represent the German higher education landscape in terms of size (5,000 to 44,000 students), variety of offered curricula, cities (rural, urban and metropolitan) and states (East and West Germany) they are located in. The cross-sectional survey was implemented as self-administered questionnaire and integrated either into the orientation week or a lecture in the first two weeks of the semester. Using administrative enrolment data, a high degree of representativeness could be established. For the participating departments, the sample covered 68.3 percent of all enrolled first semester students. Thus, except for basic aspects of self-selection into a special study programme, the respondents can be assumed to be rather representative for young adults at the beginning of their (academic) career.

All mobility episodes have been recorded on the level of postal code areas. This allows a geo-referenced analysis of individual mobility with two explicit benefits: First, mobility can be measured rather precisely as covered distance. Second, the data can be linked to other geo-referenced regional indicators (e.g. the INKAR data on the district level), which enables for instance to evaluate the impact of location-specific economic conditions on individual decisions. An additional, rather unique feature is that MESARAS-data not only provides information on past and current mobility episodes (or future plans), but also which alternatives have explicitly been considered recently. Hence, it is not only possible to see which alternative has been finally chosen, but also which alternatives have been deliberately dismissed. Due to the inclusion of a rich variety of items, the MESARAS-data supports an in-depth analysis of potential influences on individual migratory decision: Apart from socio-economic data, the survey comprises also various items to inquire risk attitude, (time) preferences, individual (labour market related) expectations and personality (including Big-5).

Survey material:

• • Project and methodological report

  • Data set (SUF access via GESIS data repository)

  • Questionnaire

  • Codebook

  • Variable overview

Related publications

Weisser, Reinhard A. (2023): The agony of university choice: Broaden horizons, expand participation?; Oxford Review of Education, 49 (2), 229-246 (download article).

Weisser, Reinhard A. (2020): How personality shapes study location choices; Research in Higher Education, 61, 88-116 (download article). 

Weisser, Reinhard A. (2019): The price of mobility: How personality and preferences shape the mobility premium of university graduates; Review of Regional Research, 39 (1), 25-64 (download article).

Weisser, Reinhard A. (2016): MESARAS 2013: Mobility, Expectations, Self-Assessment and Risk Attitude of Students; Project and methodological report, May 2016.