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What Is a Case Study?

Weighing the pros and cons of this method of research

Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Cara Lustik is a fact-checker and copywriter.

Verywell / Colleen Tighe

• Pros and Cons

What Types of Case Studies Are Out There?

Where do you find data for a case study, how do i write a psychology case study.

A case study is an in-depth study of one person, group, or event. In a case study, nearly every aspect of the subject's life and history is analyzed to seek patterns and causes of behavior. Case studies can be used in many different fields, including psychology, medicine, education, anthropology, political science, and social work.

The point of a case study is to learn as much as possible about an individual or group so that the information can be generalized to many others. Unfortunately, case studies tend to be highly subjective, and it is sometimes difficult to generalize results to a larger population.

While case studies focus on a single individual or group, they follow a format similar to other types of psychology writing. If you are writing a case study, we got you—here are some rules of APA format to reference.  

At a Glance

A case study, or an in-depth study of a person, group, or event, can be a useful research tool when used wisely. In many cases, case studies are best used in situations where it would be difficult or impossible for you to conduct an experiment. They are helpful for looking at unique situations and allow researchers to gather a lot of˜ information about a specific individual or group of people. However, it's important to be cautious of any bias we draw from them as they are highly subjective.

What Are the Benefits and Limitations of Case Studies?

A case study can have its strengths and weaknesses. Researchers must consider these pros and cons before deciding if this type of study is appropriate for their needs.

One of the greatest advantages of a case study is that it allows researchers to investigate things that are often difficult or impossible to replicate in a lab. Some other benefits of a case study:

• Allows researchers to capture information on the 'how,' 'what,' and 'why,' of something that's implemented
• Gives researchers the chance to collect information on why one strategy might be chosen over another
• Permits researchers to develop hypotheses that can be explored in experimental research

On the other hand, a case study can have some drawbacks:

• It cannot necessarily be generalized to the larger population
• Cannot demonstrate cause and effect
• It may not be scientifically rigorous
• It can lead to bias

Researchers may choose to perform a case study if they want to explore a unique or recently discovered phenomenon. Through their insights, researchers develop additional ideas and study questions that might be explored in future studies.

It's important to remember that the insights from case studies cannot be used to determine cause-and-effect relationships between variables. However, case studies may be used to develop hypotheses that can then be addressed in experimental research.

Case Study Examples

There have been a number of notable case studies in the history of psychology. Much of  Freud's work and theories were developed through individual case studies. Some great examples of case studies in psychology include:

• Anna O : Anna O. was a pseudonym of a woman named Bertha Pappenheim, a patient of a physician named Josef Breuer. While she was never a patient of Freud's, Freud and Breuer discussed her case extensively. The woman was experiencing symptoms of a condition that was then known as hysteria and found that talking about her problems helped relieve her symptoms. Her case played an important part in the development of talk therapy as an approach to mental health treatment.
• Phineas Gage : Phineas Gage was a railroad employee who experienced a terrible accident in which an explosion sent a metal rod through his skull, damaging important portions of his brain. Gage recovered from his accident but was left with serious changes in both personality and behavior.
• Genie : Genie was a young girl subjected to horrific abuse and isolation. The case study of Genie allowed researchers to study whether language learning was possible, even after missing critical periods for language development. Her case also served as an example of how scientific research may interfere with treatment and lead to further abuse of vulnerable individuals.

Such cases demonstrate how case research can be used to study things that researchers could not replicate in experimental settings. In Genie's case, her horrific abuse denied her the opportunity to learn a language at critical points in her development.

This is clearly not something researchers could ethically replicate, but conducting a case study on Genie allowed researchers to study phenomena that are otherwise impossible to reproduce.

There are a few different types of case studies that psychologists and other researchers might use:

• Collective case studies : These involve studying a group of individuals. Researchers might study a group of people in a certain setting or look at an entire community. For example, psychologists might explore how access to resources in a community has affected the collective mental well-being of those who live there.
• Descriptive case studies : These involve starting with a descriptive theory. The subjects are then observed, and the information gathered is compared to the pre-existing theory.
• Explanatory case studies : These   are often used to do causal investigations. In other words, researchers are interested in looking at factors that may have caused certain things to occur.
• Exploratory case studies : These are sometimes used as a prelude to further, more in-depth research. This allows researchers to gather more information before developing their research questions and hypotheses .
• Instrumental case studies : These occur when the individual or group allows researchers to understand more than what is initially obvious to observers.
• Intrinsic case studies : This type of case study is when the researcher has a personal interest in the case. Jean Piaget's observations of his own children are good examples of how an intrinsic case study can contribute to the development of a psychological theory.

The three main case study types often used are intrinsic, instrumental, and collective. Intrinsic case studies are useful for learning about unique cases. Instrumental case studies help look at an individual to learn more about a broader issue. A collective case study can be useful for looking at several cases simultaneously.

The type of case study that psychology researchers use depends on the unique characteristics of the situation and the case itself.

There are a number of different sources and methods that researchers can use to gather information about an individual or group. Six major sources that have been identified by researchers are:

• Archival records : Census records, survey records, and name lists are examples of archival records.
• Direct observation : This strategy involves observing the subject, often in a natural setting . While an individual observer is sometimes used, it is more common to utilize a group of observers.
• Documents : Letters, newspaper articles, administrative records, etc., are the types of documents often used as sources.
• Interviews : Interviews are one of the most important methods for gathering information in case studies. An interview can involve structured survey questions or more open-ended questions.
• Participant observation : When the researcher serves as a participant in events and observes the actions and outcomes, it is called participant observation.
• Physical artifacts : Tools, objects, instruments, and other artifacts are often observed during a direct observation of the subject.

If you have been directed to write a case study for a psychology course, be sure to check with your instructor for any specific guidelines you need to follow. If you are writing your case study for a professional publication, check with the publisher for their specific guidelines for submitting a case study.

Here is a general outline of what should be included in a case study.

Section 1: A Case History

This section will have the following structure and content:

Background information : The first section of your paper will present your client's background. Include factors such as age, gender, work, health status, family mental health history, family and social relationships, drug and alcohol history, life difficulties, goals, and coping skills and weaknesses.

Description of the presenting problem : In the next section of your case study, you will describe the problem or symptoms that the client presented with.

Describe any physical, emotional, or sensory symptoms reported by the client. Thoughts, feelings, and perceptions related to the symptoms should also be noted. Any screening or diagnostic assessments that are used should also be described in detail and all scores reported.

Your diagnosis : Provide your diagnosis and give the appropriate Diagnostic and Statistical Manual code. Explain how you reached your diagnosis, how the client's symptoms fit the diagnostic criteria for the disorder(s), or any possible difficulties in reaching a diagnosis.

Section 2: Treatment Plan

This portion of the paper will address the chosen treatment for the condition. This might also include the theoretical basis for the chosen treatment or any other evidence that might exist to support why this approach was chosen.

• Cognitive behavioral approach : Explain how a cognitive behavioral therapist would approach treatment. Offer background information on cognitive behavioral therapy and describe the treatment sessions, client response, and outcome of this type of treatment. Make note of any difficulties or successes encountered by your client during treatment.
• Humanistic approach : Describe a humanistic approach that could be used to treat your client, such as client-centered therapy . Provide information on the type of treatment you chose, the client's reaction to the treatment, and the end result of this approach. Explain why the treatment was successful or unsuccessful.
• Psychoanalytic approach : Describe how a psychoanalytic therapist would view the client's problem. Provide some background on the psychoanalytic approach and cite relevant references. Explain how psychoanalytic therapy would be used to treat the client, how the client would respond to therapy, and the effectiveness of this treatment approach.
• Pharmacological approach : If treatment primarily involves the use of medications, explain which medications were used and why. Provide background on the effectiveness of these medications and how monotherapy may compare with an approach that combines medications with therapy or other treatments.

This section of a case study should also include information about the treatment goals, process, and outcomes.

When you are writing a case study, you should also include a section where you discuss the case study itself, including the strengths and limitiations of the study. You should note how the findings of your case study might support previous research. 

In your discussion section, you should also describe some of the implications of your case study. What ideas or findings might require further exploration? How might researchers go about exploring some of these questions in additional studies?

Need More Tips?

Here are a few additional pointers to keep in mind when formatting your case study:

• Never refer to the subject of your case study as "the client." Instead, use their name or a pseudonym.
• Read examples of case studies to gain an idea about the style and format.
• Remember to use APA format when citing references .

Crowe S, Cresswell K, Robertson A, Huby G, Avery A, Sheikh A. The case study approach .  BMC Med Res Methodol . 2011;11:100.

Crowe S, Cresswell K, Robertson A, Huby G, Avery A, Sheikh A. The case study approach . BMC Med Res Methodol . 2011 Jun 27;11:100. doi:10.1186/1471-2288-11-100

Gagnon, Yves-Chantal.  The Case Study as Research Method: A Practical Handbook . Canada, Chicago Review Press Incorporated DBA Independent Pub Group, 2010.

Yin, Robert K. Case Study Research and Applications: Design and Methods . United States, SAGE Publications, 2017.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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Bridging Worlds: Family Engagement in the Transition to Kindergarten

Five-year-old Maya is struggling as she makes the transition to kindergarten, and her mother, teachers, and others in the school work together to help identify the causes of her difficulties and to find solutions so that Maya can succeed. An interactive version is also available.

Staying on the Path Toward College: One Boy at the Crossroads

Paulo Domínguez is an intelligent sixth-grade boy who has recently become disengaged from schoolwork and is hanging out with peers whom his teachers and parents fear are a bad influence. How can community programs, schools, and families work together to keep Paulo on the path towards college as he transitions to middle school? An interactive version is also available.

Making a Decision About College: Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Marisela Castillo, a high school senior, looks forward to going to a good college to prepare her for medical studies, but she knows that she will have to leave her family in order for that to happen. Should Marisela forgo her dreams for the sake of a family who depends on her household contributions? Should she leave her family to pursue those dreams? An interactive version is also available.

After School for Cindy: Family, School, and Community Roles in Out-of-School Time Teaching Case

Second grade teacher Nikki believes that participation in a formal after school program would help her student Cindy academically at school. However, Cindy's single working mother Marla prefers to keep Cindy with her in the afternoons after her numerous struggles with securing quality affordable care in the community. What are the roles of family, school, and community in promoting children's learning and development in out-of-school time?

Can We Talk About Family?

Latoya Roberts, a new first grade teacher, worries about Keon, a student being raised by his grandmother, when he begins to share information about his family in school. Will encouraging such sharing strengthen Latoya's bond with Keon and help him succeed? Latoya wants his grandmother's permission to encourage his openness, but she wonders if pushing the issue might strain her relationship with Keon's grandmother.

“Daddy Says This New Math Is Crazy”

Beth Martin, a fourth grade teacher, finds her students respond well to the new mathematics curriculum she is using in her class, but at home parents struggle to understand the new math and help their children with homework. How should Beth and her colleagues respond to parents' skepticism about the new curriculum and support their involvement at home?

Culture Clash at Intermediate School #91

Disciplinary problems at an intermediate school in the Bronx are compounded by the lack of experienced teachers whose race and class backgrounds differ from their students'. When two students get into a fight, the new teachers seek solutions that sharply contrast with the norms of the students and their families. How can teachers come to understand the families and communities in which they teach?

A Special Education Plan for Anabela: Does Supporting Her Needs Mean Holding Her Back?

A mother advocated strongly for her daughter's special education placement at a new school, but now appears under-involved to the teachers. The classroom and resource room teachers disagree about whether to retain the girl in second grade, and the classroom teacher must make a recommendation to the principal, knowing the family has opposed retention in the past.

Bilingual Voices and Parent Classroom Choices

Ines, a Spanish speaker feels responsible for her daughter's trouble in an all-English first grade classroom. Based on advice from her daughter's teacher, who believes a bilingual placement might be best, Ines reads with Nina in Spanish, but is uncertain this is the right thing to do. How can parents and teachers reconcile their differences about bilingual education?

Defining “Fine”—Communicating Academic Progress to Parents

Molly is surprised when her son's teacher recommends he attend summer school. She thought he was doing just fine and the family had been doing a lot to make the home a rich reading environment. How can teachers better communicate academic progress with parents? How can administrators support teachers in this effort?

Setting Standards at Porter Road School

A fourth grade teacher weighs the advantages and disadvantages of a mandated state educational test on her students. She must weigh the conflicting perspectives of parents, students, community members, and her teaching colleagues to define her own stance in regard to the test and to present her thoughts to the school principal.

School Won't Let Mom Talk About Her Casino Job

A middle school principal will not allow a single mother employed by the local casino to address her daughter's class during Career Week because he is concerned about promoting gambling. How can this school reorganize to serve and respect all families?

Reaching out to the Only One out There

Brian is struggling with his sexual orientation and confronts Jacob, a teacher whom he suspects is gay. Jacob reveals his sexual orientation to Brian and when Brian reports this information to his mother, Jill, she demands her son to withdraw from extracurricular activities led by a gay teacher. How can Jacob, knowing the risks of suicide among gay youth, best support Brian and gain Jill's confidence?

What's Going on With Tomasito?

Tomasito's embarrassment at having his parents drop by the school limits the development of a strong, trusting, and communicative parent-teacher relationship. Shy and quiet Tomasito does not share information about his home life with his teacher who in turn holds many misconceptions about his home context. How can teacher and family communicate better?

Friction at Madison Family Literacy Program

Noreen, an early childhood teacher, arranges free speech therapy for young Junie. She volunteers to take Junie to the therapist, but when Junie's mother fails to pick up her daughter Noreen lashes out with an angry phone message, threatening to call the Department of Social Services. How can the two make the situation better and what could have prevented it?

What Words Don't Say

Martin, an African-American student struggles with peer problems at his elementary school. He experiences racism and classism. How can Martin's mother and his teacher dialogue about sensitive issues?

Resolving Issues at Johnson Elementary School

The director of a Parent Resource Center is concerned to hear that a number of parents are boycotting the program because they think the parent coordinator used her school connections to place her son in a gifted science class. How can the director and principal ease the tension?

Suspension at Aurora Middle School

Khoi, a well behaved student who recently emigrated from a Vietnamese refugee camp, is suspended from Aurora Middle School because he stood near a fight. His mother Mai feels helpless because she speaks limited English, and only knows that her son was unjustly suspended. What is the school's role in supporting culturally diverse families?

Tim Kelly: A School Responds to a Family in Need

Tim Kelly, a first grade student, comes to school hungry, dirty, emotionally needy, and academically unprepared. His teacher believes his lack of care at home is contributing to his poor school performance. How can a teacher individualize parent involvement?

Erik's first grade teacher is concerned about his intentional aggression towards other children and communicates regularly with Erik's mother about it. Subtle differences in beliefs between Erik's mother and teacher leave both feeling unsatisfied in their attempts to help Erik. How can the two build a partnership to change Erik's behavior?

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Methodology

• What Is a Case Study? | Definition, Examples & Methods

What Is a Case Study? | Definition, Examples & Methods

Published on May 8, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on November 20, 2023.

A case study is a detailed study of a specific subject, such as a person, group, place, event, organization, or phenomenon. Case studies are commonly used in social, educational, clinical, and business research.

A case study research design usually involves qualitative methods , but quantitative methods are sometimes also used. Case studies are good for describing , comparing, evaluating and understanding different aspects of a research problem .

Table of contents

When to do a case study, step 1: select a case, step 2: build a theoretical framework, step 3: collect your data, step 4: describe and analyze the case, other interesting articles.

A case study is an appropriate research design when you want to gain concrete, contextual, in-depth knowledge about a specific real-world subject. It allows you to explore the key characteristics, meanings, and implications of the case.

Case studies are often a good choice in a thesis or dissertation . They keep your project focused and manageable when you don’t have the time or resources to do large-scale research.

You might use just one complex case study where you explore a single subject in depth, or conduct multiple case studies to compare and illuminate different aspects of your research problem.

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Once you have developed your problem statement and research questions , you should be ready to choose the specific case that you want to focus on. A good case study should have the potential to:

• Provide new or unexpected insights into the subject
• Challenge or complicate existing assumptions and theories
• Propose practical courses of action to resolve a problem
• Open up new directions for future research

TipIf your research is more practical in nature and aims to simultaneously investigate an issue as you solve it, consider conducting action research instead.

Unlike quantitative or experimental research , a strong case study does not require a random or representative sample. In fact, case studies often deliberately focus on unusual, neglected, or outlying cases which may shed new light on the research problem.

Example of an outlying case studyIn the 1960s the town of Roseto, Pennsylvania was discovered to have extremely low rates of heart disease compared to the US average. It became an important case study for understanding previously neglected causes of heart disease.

However, you can also choose a more common or representative case to exemplify a particular category, experience or phenomenon.

Example of a representative case studyIn the 1920s, two sociologists used Muncie, Indiana as a case study of a typical American city that supposedly exemplified the changing culture of the US at the time.

While case studies focus more on concrete details than general theories, they should usually have some connection with theory in the field. This way the case study is not just an isolated description, but is integrated into existing knowledge about the topic. It might aim to:

• Exemplify a theory by showing how it explains the case under investigation
• Expand on a theory by uncovering new concepts and ideas that need to be incorporated
• Challenge a theory by exploring an outlier case that doesn’t fit with established assumptions

To ensure that your analysis of the case has a solid academic grounding, you should conduct a literature review of sources related to the topic and develop a theoretical framework . This means identifying key concepts and theories to guide your analysis and interpretation.

There are many different research methods you can use to collect data on your subject. Case studies tend to focus on qualitative data using methods such as interviews , observations , and analysis of primary and secondary sources (e.g., newspaper articles, photographs, official records). Sometimes a case study will also collect quantitative data.

Example of a mixed methods case studyFor a case study of a wind farm development in a rural area, you could collect quantitative data on employment rates and business revenue, collect qualitative data on local people’s perceptions and experiences, and analyze local and national media coverage of the development.

The aim is to gain as thorough an understanding as possible of the case and its context.

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In writing up the case study, you need to bring together all the relevant aspects to give as complete a picture as possible of the subject.

How you report your findings depends on the type of research you are doing. Some case studies are structured like a standard scientific paper or thesis , with separate sections or chapters for the methods , results and discussion .

Others are written in a more narrative style, aiming to explore the case from various angles and analyze its meanings and implications (for example, by using textual analysis or discourse analysis ).

In all cases, though, make sure to give contextual details about the case, connect it back to the literature and theory, and discuss how it fits into wider patterns or debates.

If you want to know more about statistics , methodology , or research bias , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Normal distribution
• Degrees of freedom
• Null hypothesis
• Discourse analysis
• Control groups
• Mixed methods research
• Non-probability sampling
• Quantitative research
• Ecological validity

Research bias

• Rosenthal effect
• Implicit bias
• Cognitive bias
• Selection bias
• Negativity bias
• Status quo bias

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• v.7(2); 2019

Fundamentals of case study research in family medicine and community health

Sergi fàbregues.

1 Department of Psychology and Education, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

Michael D Fetters

2 Department of Family Medicine, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

The aim of this article is to introduce family medicine researchers to case study research, a rigorous research methodology commonly used in the social and health sciences and only distantly related to clinical case reports. The article begins with an overview of case study in the social and health sciences, including its definition, potential applications, historical background and core features. This is followed by a 10-step description of the process of conducting a case study project illustrated using a case study conducted about a teaching programme executed to teach international family medicine resident learners sensitive examination skills. Steps for conducting a case study include (1) conducting a literature review; (2) formulating the research questions; (3) ensuring that a case study is appropriate; (4) determining the type of case study design; (5) defining boundaries of the case(s) and selecting the case(s); (6) preparing for data collection; (7) collecting and organising the data; (8) analysing the data; (9) writing the case study report; and (10) appraising the quality. Case study research is a highly flexible and powerful research tool available to family medicine researchers for a variety of applications.

Significance statement

Given their potential for answering ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions about complex issues in their natural setting, case study designs are being increasingly used in the health sciences. Conducting a case study can, however, be a complex task because of the possibility of combining multiple methods and the need to choose between different types of case study designs. In order to introduce family medicine and community health researchers to the fundamentals of case study research, this article reviews its definition, potential applications, historical background and main characteristics. It follows on with a practical, step-by-step description of the case study process that will be useful to researchers interested in implementing this research design in their own practice.

Introduction

This article provides family medicine and community health researchers a concise resource to conduct case study research. The article opens with an overview of case study in the social and health sciences, including its definition, potential applications, historical background and core features. This is followed by a 10-step description of the process of conducting a case study project, as described in the literature. These steps are illustrated using a case study about a teaching programme executed to teach international medical learners sensitive examination skills. The article ends with recommendations of useful articles and textbooks on case study research.

Origins of case study research

Case study is a research design that involves an intensive and holistic examination of a contemporary phenomenon in a real-life setting. 1–3 It uses a variety of methods and multiple data sources to explore, describe or explain a single case bounded in time and place (ie, an event, individual, group, organisation or programme). A distinctive feature of case study is its focus on the particular characteristics of the case being studied and the contextual aspects, relationships and processes influencing it. 4 Here we do not include clinical case reports as these are beyond the scope of this article. While distantly related to clinical case reports commonly used to report unusual clinical case presentations or findings, case study is a research approach that is frequently used in the social sciences and health sciences. In contrast to other research designs, such as surveys or experiments, a key strength of case study is that it allows the researcher to adopt a holistic approach—rather than an isolated approach—to the study of social phenomena. As argued by Yin, 3 case studies are particularly suitable for answering ‘how’ research questions (ie, how a treatment was received) as well as ‘why’ research questions (ie, why the treatment produced the observed outcomes).

Given its potential for understanding complex processes as they occur in their natural setting, case study increasingly is used in a wide range of health-related disciplines and fields, including medicine, 5 nursing, 6 health services research 1 and health communication. 7 With regard to clinical practice and research, a number of authors 1 5 8 have highlighted how insights gained from case study designs can be used to describe patients’ experiences regarding care, explore health professionals’ perceptions regarding a policy change, and understand why medical treatments and complex interventions succeed or fail.

In anthropology and sociology, case study as a research design was introduced as a response to the prevailing view of quantitative research as the primary way of undertaking research. 9 From its beginnings, social scientists saw case study as a method to obtain comprehensive accounts of social phenomena from participants. In addition, it could complement the findings of survey research. Between the 1920s and 1960s, case study became the predominant research approach among the members of the Department of Sociology of the University of Chicago, widely known as ‘The Chicago School’. 10 11 During this period, prominent sociologists, such as Florian Znaniecki, William Thomas, Everett C Hughes and Howard S Becker, undertook a series of innovative case studies (including classical works such as The Polish peasant in Europe and America or Boys in White ), which laid the foundations of case study designs as implemented today.

In the 1970s, case study increasingly was adopted in the USA and UK in applied disciplines and fields, such as education, programme evaluation and public policy research. 12 As a response to the limitations of quasi-experimental designs for undertaking comprehensive programme evaluations, researchers in these disciplines saw in case studies—either alone or in combination with experimental designs—an opportunity to gain additional insights into the outcomes of programme implementation. In the mid-1980s and early 1990s, the case study approach became recognised as having its own ‘logic of design’ (p46). 13 This period coincides with the publication of a considerable number of influential articles 14–16 and textbooks 4 17 18 on case study research.

These publications were instrumental in shaping contemporary case study practice, yet they reflected divergent views about the nature of case study, including how it should be defined, designed and implemented (see Yazan 19 for a comparison of the perspectives of Yin, Merriam and Stake, three leading case study methodologists). What these publications have in common is that case study revolves around four key features.

First, case study examines a specific phenomenon in detail by performing an indepth and intensive analysis of the selected case. The rationale for case study designs, rather than more expansive designs such as surveys, is that the researcher is interested in investigating the particularity of a case, that is, the unique attributes that define an event, individual, group, organisation or programme. 2 Second, case study is conducted in natural settings where people meet, interact and change their perceptions over time. The use of the case study design is a choice in favour of ‘maintaining the naturalness of the research situation and the natural course of events’ (p177). 20

Third, case study assumes that a case under investigation is entangled with the context in which it is embedded. This context entails a number of interconnected processes that cannot be disassociated from the case, but rather are part of the study. The case study researcher is interested in understanding how and why such processes take place and, consequently, uncovering the interactions between a case and its context. Research questions concerning how and why phenomena occur are particularly appropriate in case study research. 3

Fourth, case study encourages the researcher to use a variety of methods and data types in a single study. 20 21 These can be solely qualitative, solely quantitative or a mixture of both. The latter option allows the researcher to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the case and improve the accuracy of the findings. The four above-mentioned key features of case study are shown in table 1 , using the example of a mixed methods case study evaluation. 22

Key features of case study as presented by Shultz et al 22

There are many potential applications for case study research. While often misconstrued as having only an exploratory role, case study research can be used for descriptive and explanatory research (p7–9). 3 Family medicine and community health researchers can use case study research for evaluating a variety of educational programmes, clinical programmes or community programmes.

Case study illustration from family medicine

In the featured study, Japanese family medicine residents received standardised patient instructor-based training in female breast, pelvic, male genital and prostate examinations as part of an international training collaboration to launch a new family medicine residency programme. 22 From family medicine residents, trainers and staff, the authors collected and analysed data from post-training feedback, semistructured interviews and a web-based questionnaire. While the programme was perceived favourably, they noted barriers to reinforcement in their home training programme, and taboos regarding gender-specific healthcare appear as barriers to implementing a similar programme in the home institution.

A step-by-step description of the process of carrying out a case study

As shown in table 2 and illustrated using the article by Shultz et al , 22 case study research generally includes 10 steps. While commonly conducted in this order, the steps do not always occur linearly as data collection and analysis may occur over several iterations or implemented with a slightly different order.

Ten steps for conducting a case study

SPI, standardised patient instructor.

Step 1. Conduct a literature review

During the literature review, researchers systematically search for publications, select those most relevant to the study’s purpose, critically appraise them and summarise the major themes. The literature review helps researchers ascertain what is and is not known about the phenomenon under study, delineate the scope and research questions of the study, and develop an academic or practical justification for the study. 23

Step 2. Formulate the research questions

Research questions critically define in operational terms what will be researched and how. They focus the study and play a key role in guiding design decisions. Key decisions include the case selection and choice of a case study design most suitable for the study. According to Fraenkel et al , 24 the key attributes of good research questions are (1) feasibility, (2) clarity, (3) significance, (4) connection to previous research identified in the literature and (5) compliance with ethical research standards.

Step 3. Ensure that a case study is appropriate

Before commencing the study, researchers should ensure that case study design embodies the most appropriate strategy for answering the study questions. The above-noted four key features—in depth examination of phenomena, naturalness, a focus on context and the use of a combination of methods—should be reflected in the research questions as well as subsequent design decisions.

Step 4. Determine the type of case study design

Researchers need to choose a specific case study design. Sometimes, researchers may define the case first (step 5), for example, in a programme evaluation, and the case may need to be defined before determining the type. Yin’s 3 typology is based on two dimensions, whether the study will examine a single case or multiple cases, and whether the study will focus on a single or multiple units of analysis. Figure 1 illustrates these four types of design using a hypothetical example of a programme evaluation. Table 3 shows an example of each type from the literature.

Examples of published studies using the four types of case study designs suggested by Yin 3

Types of case study designs. 3 21

In type 1 holistic single case design , researchers examine a single programme as the sole unit of analysis. In type 2 embedded single case design , the interest is not exclusively in the programme, but also in its different subunits, including sites, staff and participants. These subunits constitute the range of units of analysis. In type 3 holistic multiple case design , researchers conduct a within and cross-case comparison of two or more programmes, each of which constitutes a single unit of analysis. A major strength of multiple case designs is that they enable researchers to develop an in depth description of each case and to identify patterns of variation and similarity between the cases. Multiple case designs are likely to have stronger internal validity and generate more insightful findings than single case designs. They do this by allowing ‘examination of processes and outcomes across many cases, identification of how individual cases might be affected by different environments, and the specific conditions under which a finding may occur’ (p583). 25 In type 4 embedded multiple case design , a variant of the holistic multiple case design, researchers perform a detailed examination of the subunits of each programme, rather than just examining each case as a whole.

Step 5. Define the boundaries of the case(s) and select the case(s)

Miles et al 26 define a case as ‘a phenomenon of some sort occurring in a bounded context’ (p28). What is and is not the case and how the case fits within its broader context should be explicitly defined. As noted in step 4, this step may occur before choice of the case study type, and the process may actually occur in a back-and-forth fashion. A case can entail an individual, a group, an organisation, an institution or a programme. In this step, researchers delineate the spatial and temporal boundaries of the case, that is, ‘when and where it occurred, and when and what was of interest’ (p390). 9 Aside from ensuring the coherence and consistency of the study, bounding the case ensures that the planned research project is feasible in terms of time and resources. Having access to the case and ensuring ethical research practice are two central considerations in case selection. 1

Step 6. Prepare to collect data

Before beginning the data collection, researchers need a study protocol that describes in detail the methods of data collection. The protocol should emphasise the coherence between the data collection methods and the research questions. According to Yin, 3 a case study protocol should include (1) an overview of the case study, (2) data collection procedures, (3) data collection questions and (4) a guide for the case study report. The protocol should be sufficiently flexible to allow researchers to make changes depending on the context and specific circumstances surrounding each data collection method.

Step 7. Collect and organise the data

While case study is often portrayed as a qualitative approach to research (eg, interviews, focus groups or observations), case study designs frequently rely on multiple data sources, including quantitative data (eg, surveys or statistical databases). A growing number of authors highlight the ways in which the use of mixed methods within case study designs might contribute to developing ‘a more complete understanding of the case’ (p902), 21 shedding light on ‘the complexity of a case’ (p118) 27 or increasing ‘the internal validity of a study’ (p6). 1 Guetterman and Fetters 21 explain how a qualitative case study can also be nested within a mixed methods design (ie, be considered the qualitative component of the design). An interesting strategy for organising multiple data sources is suggested by Yin. 3 He recommends using a case study database in which different data sources (eg, audio files, notes, documents or photographs) are stored for later retrieval or inspection. See guidance from Creswell and Hirose 28 for conducting a survey and qualitative data collection in mixed methods and DeJonckheere 29 on semistructured interviewing.

Step 8. Analyse the data

Bernard and Ryan 30 define data analysis as ‘the search for patterns in data and for ideas that help explain why these patterns are there in the first place’ (p109). Depending on the case study design, analysis of the qualitative and quantitative data can be done concurrently or sequentially. For the qualitative data, the first step of the analysis involves segmenting the data into coding units, ascribing codes to data segments and organising the codes in a coding scheme. 31 Depending on the role of theory in the study, an inductive, data-driven approach can be used where meaning is found in the data, or a deductive, concept-driven approach can be adopted where predefined concepts derived from the literature, or previous research, are used to code the data. 32 The second step involves searching for patterns across codes and subsets of respondents, so major themes are identified to describe, explain or predict the phenomenon under study. Babchuk 33 provides a step-by-step guidance for qualitative analysis in this issue. When conducting a single case study, the within-case analysis yields an in depth, thick description of the case. When the study involves multiple cases, the cross-comparison analysis elicits a description of similarities and divergence between cases and may generate explanations and theoretical predictions regarding other cases. 26

For the quantitative part of the case study, data are entered in statistical software packages for conducting descriptive or inferential analysis. Guetterman 34 provides a step-by-step guidance on basic statistics. In case study designs where both data strands are analysed simultaneously, analytical techniques include pattern matching, explanation building, time-series analysis and creating logic models (p142–167). 3

Step 9. Write the case study report

The case study report should have the following three characteristics. First, the description of the case and its context should be sufficiently comprehensive to allow the reader to understand the complexity of the phenomena under study. 35 Second, the data should be presented in a concise and transparent manner to enable the reader to question, or to re-examine, the findings. 36 Third, the report should be adapted to the interests and needs of its primary audience or audiences (eg, academics, practitioners, policy-makers or funders of research). Yin 3 suggests six formats for organising case study reports, namely linear-analytic, comparative, chronological, theory building, suspense and unsequenced structures. To facilitate case transferability and applicability to other similar contexts, the case study report must include a detailed description of the case.

Step 10. Appraise quality

Although presented as the final step of the case study process, quality appraisal should be considered throughout the study. Multiple criteria and frameworks for appraising the quality of case study research have been suggested in the literature. Yin 3 suggests the following four criteria: construct validity (ie, the extent to which a study accurately measures the concepts that it claims to investigate), internal validity (ie, the strength of the relationship between variables and findings), external validity (ie, the extent to which the findings can be generalised) and reliability (ie, the extent to which the findings can be replicated by other researchers conducting the same study). Yin 37 also suggests using two separate sets of guidelines for conducting case study research and for appraising the quality of case study proposals. Stake 4 presents a 20-item checklist for critiquing case study reports, and Creswell and Poth 38 and Denscombe 39 outline a number of questions to consider. Since these quality frameworks have evolved from different disciplinary and philosophical backgrounds, the researcher’s approach should be coherent with the epistemology of the study. Figure 2 provides a quality appraisal checklist adapted from Creswell and Poth 38 and Denscombe. 39

Checklist for evaluating the quality of a case study. 38 39

The challenges to conducting case study research include rationalising the literature based on literature review, writing the research questions, determining how to bound the case, and choosing among various case study purposes and designs. Factors held in common with other methods include analysing and presenting the findings, particularly with multiple data sources.

Other resources

Resources with more in depth guidance on case study research include Merriam, 17 Stake 4 and Yin. 3 While each reflects a different perspective on case study research, they all provide useful guidance for designing and conducting case studies. Other resources include Creswell and Poth, 38 Swanborn 2 and Tight. 40 For mixed methods case study designs, Creswell and Plano Clark, 27 Guetterman and Fetters, 21 Luck et al , 6 and Plano Clark et al 41 provide guidance. Byrne and Ragin’s 42 The SAGE Handbook of Case-Based Methods and Mills et al ’s 43 Encyclopedia of case study research provide guidance for experienced case study researchers.

Conclusions

Family medicine and community health researchers engage in a wide variety of clinical, educational, research and administrative programmes. Case study research provides a highly flexible and powerful research tool to evaluate rigorously many of these endeavours and disseminate this information.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the help of Dick Edelstein and Marie-Hélène Paré in editing the final manuscript.

Correction notice: This article has been corrected. Reference details have been updated.

Contributors: SF and MDF conceived and drafted the manuscript, and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Funding: The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.

Competing interests: None declared.

Patient consent for publication: Not required.

Provenance and peer review: Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.

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Case Study – A Family Divided

Print this case study here:  Case Study – A Family Divided

Case Study: A Family Divided

A Case Study by Robert L. Potter Discussion Questions by Rosemary Flanigan

A forty-five-year-old man with a three-year history of cardiovascular disease has entered the hospital with a stroke that has paralyzed his right side and caused him to aspirate food of any consistency. His mental status is clouded and there is disagreement as to whether he has decisional capacity. His language capacity is only “yes” and “no,” and his responses are inconsistent. The attending physician is convinced that the patient has lost decisional capacity while two family members are equally convinced that he has decisional capacity. The patient’s wife and two other children are ambivalent about his competency to make decisions. The prognosis for recovery of safe swallowing and speech approaches zero because of the dense damage to the cerebral cortex visible on brain imaging. Two neurological consultants have verified that recovery is likely to be minimal and that permanent, severe disability will be the outcome.

The patient does not have an advance directive. The patient’s wife says that they never did discuss his preferences about life-sustaining treatment. She is convinced that he would not want to live in this disabled condition but is uncertain whether to request the placement of a feeding tube. Two of her four adult children are strongly opposed to the tube placement, while the other two insist that not to do so would be to “kill our father.” The patient’s wife is torn between these two positions, but finally requests that the tube be placed.

The attending physician and the rest of the treatment team are opposed to placing the feeding tube. Their argument is that the patient has “minimal consciousness” and will not improve. They define this as a futile situation with no reasonable expectation of recovery. Furthermore, two nurses claim that during previous hospitalizations for episodes of cardiovascular events the patient told them that he would not want to be sustained by artificial means — not by ventilators, renal dialysis, or tube feeding. It is their position that the patient has expressed his preference to not be kept alive in a futile situation.

The family requests an ethics consultation.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1. The judgment of futility should be a conclusion of a communications process, not a beginning. How would you propose beginning the communication?

• Who should be present?
• What information should be shared?
• What alternatives are on the table?
• What is your goal in participating in the discussion?

2. The family is divided over whether their husband/father should be placed on a feeding tube. Consider and discuss the following statements:

• The effectiveness of the feeding tube is a clinical matter.
• The benefits of the feeding tube for the patient depend on the patient’s wishes and quality of life, which the patient or the patient’s surrogate and family must determine.
• The burdens the treatment (feeding tube) imposes are a consideration for both parties.

3. Role play the discussion. Express your assumptions and loyalties and listen attentively to the other speakers.

4. Evaluate the role-playing experience. Did it affect your view of the case? If yes, how will you advise the family and the healthcare providers? If not, what is to be done now?

5. How would this case have been different if the attending physician had been the one asking for a consultation?

The Family History Guide Blog

… See the latest news about your free learning and training site for family history!

The Value of Case Studies in Family History

“Could I have an example, please?” This is one of the most common questions we all have, about almost any subject, whether or not we ask it out loud. Good examples help us connect the dots in our learning. They help us see relationships between pieces of information, how cause and effect works, and how we can apply principles in a variety of ways.

On the other hand, an example that’s unfocused or unclear might be confusing and worse than no example at all.

It’s much the same in family history. We can find some great tools or pieces of information, but how do we apply them in our own research? That’s where a good case study can be really valuable. It not only walks us through solving a research problem, but it also does the following:

• Highlights the principles that were used
• Explains why they were effective
• Offers suggestions on how you might use them in your research

As you might expect, not all case studies are created equal. Sometimes you have to dig a bit to identify the principles and how you can use them. Be prepared to use “intelligent filters”—skip past any parts that are repetitious or wandering, and read between the lines to find nuggets of information you might need. In some ways, it’s like mining a historical record for insights. The tips and trick you learn will prove valuable as you search for clues in your own ancestors’ stories.

In this newspaper case study, the author helps us find research clues by using the following elements:

• Background : This sets the stage for the person we are following.
• Comparisons : The primary account of the story is compared with accounts from other newspapers. This shows the value of working with multiple sources in research.
• Next Steps : The author suggests additional approaches and record searches. This is good for a brief case study, while more extensive ones will provide details of what was found in the extra research.
• Takeaway : This is the main point learned from the case study. You can add your own takeaways, from your analysis of what you have read.

Case Studies in The Family History Guide

There are plenty of links to research case studies in The Family History Guide, from basic record finds, to tracing immigrant ancestors, to breaking through walls with DNA results, and more. Many of them are included in the Country and Ethnic pages, plus more in the Vault.

Here are a few of the case studies to get you started, in video and article formats (videos noted with their timings):

• ExploreGenealogy: Overcoming a Family History Roadblock
• Family Locket: Hooking Teens on Research with Land Patents
• Family Locket: Putting Your Ancestors in their Place
• BYU FHL: Case Studies in Migration for Genealogists —67:54
• FamilySearch: Using English Records— 16:00
• FamilySearch: A French Case Study: Church Records —5:54
• Ancestry DNA:  Genealogy Brick Wall Case Study —21:26
• The Root: Who Were My Kin Born During Slavery?

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• Published: 11 April 2024

Non-coresident family as a driver of migration change in a crisis: the case of the COVID-19 pandemic

• Unchitta Kan   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6215-4406 1 ,
• Jericho McLeod   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9807-2050 1 &
• Eduardo López   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3940-2608 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  11 , Article number:  503 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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• Complex networks

Changes in U.S. migration during the COVID-19 pandemic show that many moved to less populated cities from larger cities, deviating from previous trends. In this study, building on prior work in the literature showing that the abundance of family ties is inversely related to population size, we analyze these migration changes with a focus on the crucial, yet overlooked factor of extended family. Employing two large-scale data sets, census microdata and mobile phone GPS relocation data, we show a collection of empirical results that paints a picture of migration change affected by kin. Namely, we find that people migrated closer to family at higher rates after the COVID-19 pandemic started. Moreover, even controlling for factors such as population density and cost of living, we find that changes in net in-migration tended to be larger and positive in cities with larger proportions of people who can be parents to adult children (our proxy for parental family availability, which is also inversely related to population size). Our study advances the demography-disaster nexus and amplifies ongoing literature highlighting the role of broader kinship systems in large-scale socioeconomic phenomena.

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Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic brought about a profound change in how people live and work. Among other things, the closure of facilities and the shift to remote work weakened the connection between people’s place of residence and work. Many individuals were no longer constrained to live in a particular city for economic opportunities, and some were incentivized by financial or personal reasons to relocate. It is not surprising then, that notable changes in U.S. domestic migration trends were observed after the pandemic started. Our analysis, as well as others (Coven et al. 2023 ; Haslag and Weagley, 2022 ), suggests that a substantial proportion of these deviations can be attributed to a modification in the destinations of people’s migration: more people moved to smaller (less populated) cities, especially from larger cities, and fewer people moved to large cities.

What characteristics of cities of different sizes attracted or repelled people during the pandemic? Less crowding, lower cost of living, measures introduced to control the pandemic, and even climate may have helped to explain the disruption of typical migration patterns and why people were moving to smaller cities. In this study, we investigate a factor that has been overlooked: extended family who reside elsewhere. We ask the question, can some of these migration changes be attributable to individuals relocating to be closer to kin?

Our question is motivated by a recent empirical finding that an individual is more likely to have kin ties located in smaller cities (McLeod et al. 2023 ), as well as lines of research that point to the critical role of kin ties (David-Barrett et al. 2023 ; Furstenberg, 2020 ; Mulder, 2018 ) and how they are particularly activated during crises (Reed et al. 2023 ; Völker, 2023 ). Importantly, COVID-19 was a major societal event that, at least temporarily, uncoupled geography and economic aspirations—the latter of which is in tension with extended family orientation (Miller, 1976 ). If family-driven migration was indeed happening at higher rates, flows to smaller cities would follow as a consequence of the spatial distribution of non-coresident family ties in the U.S. (McLeod et al. 2023 ).

In this paper, we investigate empirically the connection between changes in inter-city migration during the COVID-19 crisis, city population, and the role that non-coresident family played in both large-scale patterns and individual-level migration dynamics. Our analyses show these factors to be related, emphasizing that the spatial distribution of people’s non-coresident family is relevant in order to understand human migration. Here, for reasons explained below, our test of the influence of family on migration is for parental relationships. Our results point to important implications in the context of cities, and amplify ongoing literature which highlights the need for more research on the role of broader kinship in large-scale socioeconomic phenomena (David-Barrett, 2019 ; David-Barrett et al. 2023 ), especially non-household kin that is outside of the nuclear family (Furstenberg, 2020 ; Reed et al. 2023 ).

Non-coresident family as a driver of migration in a crisis

There are at least three lines of research that help us understand how non-household kin may influence migration decisions in normal times, and why it is plausible that people would relocate to be closer to them in times of crisis. The first line is referred to as the ‘family ties perspective’ (Mulder, 2007 , 2018 ). The second line is the literature which focuses on how social ties are activated in a crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic (Reed et al. 2023 ; Völker, 2023 ). The third line is the well-known tension between personal economic and social achievements (Miller, 1976 ). We review each of these in turn.

Importance of kin

The ‘family ties perspective’ (Mulder, 2007 , 2018 ) argues that family ties need to be taken into account in migration analyses because of three crucial ingredients they offer: support, need for proximity, and uniqueness.

Family is central to social and support networks of people (Dunbar and Spoors, 1995 ; Plickert et al. 2007 ; Rözer et al. 2016 ; Wellman, 1979 ). While individuals can, and do, maintain ties with family via calls after moving away (David-Barrett et al. 2023 ; Lambiotte et al. 2008 ), family face-to-face interaction and transfer of practical or physical support cannot be fully replaced by virtual interaction; they require geographical proximity and thus incentivize migration.

Kin is fundamentally different from other types of relationships because it is given rather than chosen. Also, an important characteristic of kinship that is less prominent in other relationships is the feeling of responsibility that kin feels towards each other (Mulder, 2018 ). From transfers of resources to help with mundane tasks to emotional support to aversion of crises, people look to their kin. Parents and adult children are more than ten times as likely to give or receive major assistance compared to other types of relationships (Wellman, 1979 ). In 2012 alone, it was estimated that informal care, which includes kin-based intergenerational care, amounted to over one billion hours of unpaid work per week in the U.S. (Dukhovnov and Zagheni, 2015 ). People place greater importance on kin than non-kin when it comes to interpersonal contacts (David-Barrett et al. 2023 ), especially women in their child-rearing years; collectively, individuals may even prioritize family over themselves (Krys et al. 2023 ).

Research has also shown that merely having family in one’s social network can influence the composition of that network itself (Dunbar and Spoors, 1995 ; Rözer et al. 2016 ). At the same time, the composition of one’s support network can also become focused on kin ties in non-routine situations.

Crises and kin ties

In times of crises, kin ties may be particularly activated. For example, as formal care facilities shut down during the pandemic (Lee and Parolin, 2021 ), informal intergenerational care (e.g. day care of young children by grandparents or eldercare by adult children) was likely to be even more important. This may be evidenced in the study by Völker ( 2023 ), which indicated that while people’s social networks became smaller and focused on core ties after the COVID-19 pandemic started, the network of practical helpers of the elderly proportionally consisted more of their children; similarly, among individuals aged 18–35, parents made up a larger share of their practical helpers networks.

Simultaneously, during the pandemic, Reed et al. ( 2023 ) found an increase in communications with non-coresident kin. Tunçgenç et al. ( 2023 ) found family bonds to positively influence well-being, and that among close social ties, only family bonds were positively linked to engagement in health behaviors. These findings are in line with another study by Lee et al. ( 2023 ) showing the stability and strengthening of bonds with kin compared to other ties after the start of the pandemic.

The activation of kin ties in systemic crises is not a phenomenon specific to just COVID-19. Other examples dating decades earlier include Shavit et al. ( 1994 ) who have found similar results in the context of the Gulf War, and Hurlbert et al. ( 2000 ) in the context of hurricane Andrew.

Extended kin in migration decisions

While previous literature findings have established that non-household kin can influence migration decisions (see, e.g., Kan, 2007 ; Spring et al. 2017 ), kinship factors may be in tension with economic aspirations in the propensity to migrate (Miller, 1976 ). In other words, people may have to choose between being closer to economic opportunities or to extended family. However, it can be argued that COVID-19 is a unique case in that it is a systemic crisis that enabled more mobility, not less. At a time where individuals might look to their kin the most, the pandemic also decoupled geography and employment, allowing people to achieve proximity to their extended family to a greater degree than before.

Parental ties

Among kin ties, intergenerational ties are understood in the literature to be the “important arena of action in Western kinship systems” (Furstenberg, 2020 ). The majority of support from kin flows vertically (typically in the downward direction, i.e., from parents to children or grandchildren). That about 75% of people in the U.S. whose parents or children are still alive reside within 30 miles from one of them reflects this situation (Choi et al. 2020 ). Parents-in-law often act similarly to parents in terms of the support they provide (Compton and Pollak, 2014 ; Wellman and Wortley, 1989 ), and in many cultures they can be considered consequential in terms of one’s social network and cooperation (David-Barrett, 2023 ). While there is some modest evidence of horizontal transfer of time and resources between family members such as siblings (Wellman and Wortley, 1989 ; White, 2001 ), relatively little is known about contacts and exchanges between extended kin such as aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. (Furstenberg, 2020 ).

Aside from the clear evidence of their prominence, parental ties are a very compelling variable to study as a “pull factor” in pandemic-migration for the reason that migration is highly age- and life course-specific as well as context-dependent (Millington, 2000 ).

Individuals aged between 18 and 44 tend to have the highest propensity to migrate (Molloy et al. 2011 ; Rogerson and Kim, 2005 ). This propensity declines with age (Castro and Rogers, 1984 ), which may have to do with the accumulation of social capital (Kan, 2007 ); it also declines with the household family life cycle stage (Miller, 1976 ).

At the same time, individuals in the 18–44 age range may also be the most likely to need support from or give support to parental family. For example, dual-earner parents returning to live near their own parents for childcare assistance is an identified phenomenon in the literature (Bailey et al. 2004 ). Grandparents are known to be important providers of early childcare (Dukhovnov and Zagheni, 2015 ; Furstenberg, 2020 ; Mulder, 2018 ), and evidence suggests proximity to them increases labor force participation among mothers with young children (Compton and Pollak, 2014 ). In the other care direction, individuals in their late child-rearing period–who belong to the so-called “sandwich generation”–may also find themselves needing to care for their aging parents.

Therefore, if it is largely the individuals in their twenties, thirties, and forties who were migrating for familial reasons, it is likely that they would look to where their parents were. For this reason, we focus in this study primarily on parental family.

Materials and methods

Design of study.

Our study design seeks to provide evidence for the existence of a three-way relation between pandemic-migration, city population size, and non-coresident family. First, we analyze large-scale relocation data and show the increased migration flow to cities with smaller population after the pandemic started. Then, through three empirical investigations, we link migration to parental family as well as parental family to population; the first investigation is done at the individual level, while the other two are done at the city level.

In Investigation 1, we examine whether there are differences in individual-level migration rates to move towards parental family (or “return to home”) after the pandemic began in 2020. In Investigation 2, we construct a proxy variable that estimates the abundance of people who can be parents to adult children in each U.S. city and relate it to both city population and migration variables. In Investigation 3, we estimate an empirical model which tests whether cities with higher parental family availability saw a higher net population influx after the pandemic started.

Overall, Investigation 1 serves to validate our line of inquiry (linking migrational change to parental family) as well as our study assumptions, while Investigations 2 and 3 connect parental family availability to both city population and changes in net migration of cities. The empirical model controls for relevant migration factors and mitigates potential confounders. Put together, our study examines whether the trend to migrate to smaller cities is partially a consequence of people moving to be closer to family, coupled with the heterogenous spatial distribution of parental family ties in the U.S.

We now elaborate on these analyses and the methodology we employ, beginning with the data used in this study.

The two primary, large-scale data sets we employ in this study are the county-to-county relocation index aggregated from anonymized, opted-in mobile phone GPS data provided by the location intelligence company Spectus ( 2021 ), and the yearly U.S. Census American Community Survey Public Use Microdata Samples (ACS PUMS).

The Spectus data set has an advantage over administrative place-level migration data (e.g., from the U.S. Internal Revenue Service) due to its higher temporal resolution (weekly) as well as its ability to capture real time migration by algorithmically detecting new home location from mobile phone GPS instead of relying on individuals to report their change of address to governmental agencies (which could occur with a significant delay or not occur at all). Aggregated to the city level, our data encompass nearly one-fourth of all possible origin-destination city pairs in the U.S.

Our second large-scale data set, ACS PUMS, contains individual-level information on a subsample of the U.S. Census ACS respondents, including the demographics of each person in the household, their place of birth, and their current place of residence. The microdata sample also includes survey questions about migration in the past year, such as whether a respondent has moved and the location from which they moved. For our study, we obtain PUMS yearly samples for the years 2016 to 2021 (corresponding to six separate samples) from IPUMS USA (Ruggles et al. 2023 ) which integrates and harmonizes PUMS data across all survey years. Across the six years, our IPUMS USA sample contains in total N  = 18,694,272 person-records from N  = 8,247,978 households.

Supplementarily, we obtain city population sizes, as well as control variables used in our empirical model from the ACS aggregated estimates (U.S. Census Bureau, 2020 ) and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis ( 2020 ).

Calculations of inter-city migration from Spectus data

In the raw form, the Spectus data measures the weekly relocation flows between pairs of counties in the U.S. as an aggregated index called the Relocation Index. To calculate the Relocation Index r h k ( t ) during week t between county h (old county) and county k (new county), Spectus uses the following formula:

Home location is detected using an algorithm that identifies persistent night-time GPS location. For movers, this algorithm detects a change in the home location. Note that the Spectus data preserves the privacy of the users as they are aggregated at the county level. Our data spans from January 2019 to December 2020.

Our study is focused on inter-city migration, and we take core-based statistical areas (CBSAs) to be the geographic unit of study. CBSAs are urban areas delineated by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, and can be either micropolitan areas (with population between 10,000 and 49,999 people) or metropolitan areas (with population of at least 50,000 people). We estimate dyadic relocation flows at the CBSA level by performing additional aggregations on the county-level Spectus data. In particular, to estimate the number R i j ( t ) of moves (as opposed to an index) from city i to city j during week t , we use the formula

where the sums are over the counties that have a geographic correspondence to the appropriate CBSAs (i.e., counties that are part of the CBSAs), p h is the population of county h , and π h is the estimated device sampling rate for county h . We calibrate π h by calculating and comparing yearly Spectus flow at the county level to the average yearly county-to-county migration flow derived from the 5-year, 2016–2019 migration data published by the U.S. Census Bureau ( 2021 ).

We also calculate the number R i j ( θ ) of relocations from city i to city j spanning over a certain time period as

We use θ  = 0 to indicate the period between April 2019 and December 2019, which we take to be the baseline period in this study, and θ  = 1 to indicate the period between April 2020 and December 2020, the pandemic comparison period. Because we are only concerned with inter-city migration and not intra-city flows, we set R i i ( t ) and R i i ( θ ) to 0.

In total, there are 211,902 origin-destination city pairs for the baseline period and 192,946 origin-destination city pairs for the comparison period; both periods comprise 926 unique origin CBSAs and 926 unique destination CBSAs, i.e. all CBSAs within non-territory U.S. The smallest city in the data set is Lamesa, TX (with population around 13,000 people) and the largest city is the New York metropolitan area (with population around 19.3 million people).

Analysis of trend to move to smaller cities during COVID-19

To illustrate the trend to move to smaller cities during COVID-19–the phenomenon which motivated this study–we define \(z({P}^{{\prime} };P,\theta )\) , the probability that movers from origin CBSAs whose log-population sizes fall into the log-population bin P  + Δ P would relocate to a destination CBSA whose log-population falls into the \({P}^{{\prime} }+\Delta P\) bin during period θ (where Δ P is the bin size). Binning is employed to ease interpretation of the results and to manage fluctuations from the sparsity of samples of city population sizes, and we use log-population instead of raw population due to the skewed nature of city sizes in the U.S. (Ioannides and Skouras, 2013 ). Using the migration quantity derived from the Spectus data (Eq. ( 3 )), we calculate \(z({P}^{{\prime} };P,\theta )\) as follows:

where the notation ∑ i ∈ P indicates summation over cities i whose log-population sizes belong to the bin P  + Δ P .

To capture the changes in z after the pandemic started, we calculate the ratio \(z({P}^{{\prime} };P,\theta =1)/z({P}^{{\prime} };P,\theta =0)\) for all \({P}^{{\prime} },P\) .

Investigation 1: micro-level analysis of return-to-home movers

As a first investigation to examine potential links between non-coresident family and migration change during the COVID-19 pandemic, we employ the IPUMS USA microdata samples to study and compare the micro-level behavior of movers across the years 2016 to 2021. We examine whether there are differences in migration rates to move towards parental family after the pandemic began in 2020. In this exercise, we do not yet relate migration to specific cities or city sizes due to limitations in the data (namely, the PUMS variables of interest are only available at the levels of U.S. state and Census Public Use Microdata Areas). However, this exercise validates our line of inquiry (linking migrational change to kin) as well as study assumptions that will be relevant to our next investigation.

We classify three types of family-driven, “return-to-home” movers in the IPUMS USA data to analyze their patterns: (1) individuals moving into their parents’ households; (2) individuals moving back to their native state from elsewhere but not joining their parents’ household; and (3) family household units moving back to their native state from elsewhere. We call these types of moves Type 1, 2, and 3, respectively (see Table 1 ).

Type 1 movers are relatively simple to interpret: these are individuals who moved back in with their parents. For some adults and households that are a family unit, however, moving in with their parents may not be an option. Instead, they may choose to relocate to be within the locality of their parents. Precise information about the residence of one’s parents is highly identifiable and not publicly available. Therefore, we follow the literature (Compton and Pollak, 2014 ) and use one’s native state as a proxy variable for proximity to or presence of family ties. The residence of one’s parents is often the home in which one grew up, which is in turn often located in one’s state of birth. We refer to such returns to place of nativity performed by individuals as Type 2 moves, and we refer to such moves performed by family household units as Type 3 moves.

As a technical point which applies to both Type 1 and 2 movers, we consider individual movers to be persons who had migrated in the past year at the time of the PUMS survey, who were either a household of one person or a person who resided in a household in which not everyone had moved. If a household was labeled in the survey as a family household, was larger than one person, and every householder had moved, then we consider the household to be a family household unit mover (which is relevant to identifying Type 3 movers).

To identify Type 1 movers, we look at individual movers who had migrated within the same state or between states in the past year at the time of the survey (i.e., whose ‘ MIGRATE1 ’ variable values are either 2 or 3 in the encoding of the IPUMS USA data). For each person in the sample, IPUMS USA includes variables that identify the mother (‘ MOMLOC ’) and father (‘ POPLOC ’) of that person if they live in the same household. (These variables are calculated probabilistically by IPUMS USA as they are not present in the regular ACS PUMS.) For each individual mover, if at least one parent was present in their current household and the parent(s) had not also moved in the past year, we classify that individual as a Type 1 mover.

To identify Type 2 movers, we look at IPUMS USA individual movers who had migrated from a different state in the past year at the time of the survey (‘ MIGRATE1 ’ = 2). If their current state of residence (‘ STATEFIP ’) was the same as their state of birth (‘ BPL ’), we label them as Type 2 movers (i.e., individual movers moving back to place of nativity from elsewhere). We note that, strictly speaking, Type 1 moves are not mutually exclusive from Type 2 because one’s parental household may be in one’s native state (so Type 2 moves may contain some Type 1 moves). However, for our study, we exclude Type 1 moves from Type 2 moves.

Finally, we classify family households (‘ HHTYPE ’ is 1, 2, or 3) larger than one person whose every member had migrated in the past year to be Type 3 movers if their migration destination (current state of residence) was the place of birth of at least one householder.

We introduce the quantity λ m ( t ), where m   ∈  {1, 2, 3} indexes the type of movers, to capture the rates with which their respective types of migration occur in each year t . Table 1 provides a summary (who and where moved) of these move types and their corresponding λ m ( t ). For notational brevity, we assume the dependence on t in λ m ( t ) is implicit and write λ m interchangeably. We calculate λ 1 and λ 2 for each year by dividing the number of Type 1 and Type 2 movers, respectively, by the total number of individual movers. We calculate λ 3 by dividing the number of Type 3 movers by the total number of household movers. Our calculations are with consideration to sampling weights (see Section “Discussion” of the publication by U.S. Census Bureau ( 2021 ) for ACS PUMS sampling weights). Explicitly, we use the formula

to calculate λ 1 and λ 2 , where u denotes persons in the IPUMS USA sample s ( t ) in year \(t,{{\mathbb{1}}}_{{{{\rm{ind}}}}}\) and \({{\mathbb{1}}}_{m}\) are binary variables ( = 1 if a condition is met and 0 if it is not) indicating whether u is an individual mover and Type m mover, respectively. The variable w u corresponds to the person sampling weight (‘ PERWT ’) of u .

For λ 3 , we use

where q denotes households in the yearly IPUMS USA sample, \({{\mathbb{1}}}_{{{{\rm{hh}}}}}\) and \({{\mathbb{1}}}_{3}\) are binary variables indicating whether q is a family household mover and Type 3 mover, respectively, and w q corresponds to the household sampling weight (‘ HHWT ’) of q .

We note that for the 2020 sample, IPUMS USA uses experimental sampling weights published by U.S. Census Bureau to address data collection and quality issues associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the results for 2020 should still be interpreted with caution, we include them because they nevertheless provide valuable information.

Investigation 2: city-level analysis of parental family availability, population size, and net migration

If people were to migrate back to parental family after the COVID-19 shock, then we should see also larger flows to cities which have a greater abundance of parental family households. McLeod et al. ( 2023 ) refer to this abundance as availability . For our study, we require measures of parental family availability and net migration at the city level, described in this section.

Constructing parental family availability proxy variable from IPUMS USA

As mentioned earlier, there is considerable scarcity of data linking people to the location of their parents. Therefore, in this exercise we introduce a proxy variable v i which estimates the stock of households in each city i whose householder(s) can be parents to adult children, capturing the notion of parental family availability.

Motivated by the literature and by methodological reasons, we design our proxy variable v i as follows. Because PUMS data do not contain information on kin who do not reside in the same household as the sample individuals, we cannot directly infer the city in which an individual’s parents may be located. At the same time, based on the literature we discussed in Section “Parental ties” (Castro and Rogers, 1984 ; Kan, 2007 ; Miller, 1976 ; Millington, 2000 ; Molloy et al. 2011 ; Mulder, 2018 ; Rogerson and Kim, 2005 ), we assume that relocating individuals tend to generally be in their twenties, thirties, or forties, because these demographic groups tend to have the highest propensities to migrate. (We validate this assumption using statistics of the age of “return-to-home” movers in our previous analysis). With this assumption, we expect that their parents would be at least a generation older. Therefore, we base our parental household estimation on certain age and marriage criteria.

Explicitly, within the IPUMS USA 2019 sample, we identify households in the sample that satisfy the following criteria:

Family households in which the head of household or their spouse (if married and spouse is present) is at least 50 years old, or

Non-family households in which the head of household is at least 50 years old and is either married but no spouse present, separated, divorced, or widowed.

The specific age of 50 was chosen based on the literature finding that “the vast majority of American parents who are older than the age of 50 provide support to children and grandchildren” (Furstenberg, 2020 ). Summing the household sampling weights (‘ HHWT ’) of these households estimates the total number of such households in the sample.

The most detailed geographic identifier in the ACS PUMS is the Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA) which consists of one or more contiguous counties and census tracts. Because our goal is to analyze migration patterns at the city level, we apply a PUMA-to-CBSA geo-allocation mapping algorithm to obtain city estimates of the parental family proxy variable. The mapping algorithm relies on the geographic correspondence file between PUMAs and CBSAs obtained from the Geocorr application maintained by the Missouri Census Data Center ( 2018 ). In this correspondence file, each entry is a PUMA–CBSA intersection along with an allocation factor which represents the proportion of the population living in this intersection out of the entire PUMA. Using these factors, we allocate the weighted total number of households satisfying the above criteria in each PUMA to each CBSA that intersects with it. Finally, we divide this number in each CBSA by the weighted total number of households in the CBSA to obtain the share of parental family households v i . We relate this proxy variable to both city population size and migration quantities described below.

City-level net migration

From our Spectus inter-city flows R i j ( t ) and R i j ( θ ), defined in Eqs. ( 2 ) and ( 3 ) respectively, we derive two net migration quantities: y i ( t ), and y i ( θ ).

The quantity y i ( t ) is a measure of net in-migration of a city and captures the inflow per outflow of city i during week t . It is given by

where the numerator gives the total flow into a city i from all other cities during week t and the denominator gives the total flow out of a city i to all other cities during week t . Notice that y i ( t ) > 1 implies that the migration inflow exceeds the migration outflow of city i during week t (i.e., positive net influx). Consequently, y i ( t ) captures the direction and magnitude of the net migration flow of a city.

We also calculate the corresponding quantity spanning the comparison time period, y i ( θ ), using

Similar to the approach in Section “Analysis of trend to move to smaller cities during COVID-19”, we can calculate the ratio y i ( θ  = 1)/ y i ( θ  = 0) to capture the changes in the net in-migration between the two time periods. We relate both y i ( t ) and y i ( θ  = 1)/ y i ( θ  = 0) to our parental family proxy v i .

Investigation 3: empirical model

Finally, we estimate an empirical model to help control for other factors that may have been at play in pandemic-migration. We use a difference-in-differences (DiD) strategy with a continuous treatment variable (namely, v i ). DiD is an econometric model used to estimate the effect of a treatment by comparing the outcomes in the treated and untreated groups between two time periods (Lee, 2016 ); a continuous treatment is used to model increasing intensity of treatment instead of splitting units into treated and untreated groups. Applied to our study, with our outcome being changes in net in-migration, we can model parental family availability as a continuous treatment and take the two time periods to be before and after the COVID-19 shock.

Our model, which pools data from both before and during the pandemic, can be written as

where the dependent variable is the log-ratio of the net flux into a city (see Eq. ( 8 )) after and before the pandemic started, measuring the changes in migration. C denotes scalar control variables, indexed by a . Notice that the city-specific differences that existed in the dependent variable across cities before the COVID-19 shock are accounted for by the denominator in the log-ratio, constituting the city fixed effect.

Our coefficient of interest, β , measures whether higher parental family availability v would lead to higher net flux after the pandemic started. The coefficient γ is city-independent and accounts for the effects that COVID-19 alone had on the dependent variable, constituting the time fixed effect. Finally, the city-dependent control variables C a are included because we cannot ignore the possibility that the changes in migration behavior may have also been influenced by other factors whose importance may vary after the pandemic started. Using population density as an example, individuals may experience a higher desire to move to less dense places during the pandemic to avoid being infected, in which case the ρ coefficient for population density will be negative. We include control variables that are relevant to relocation decisions: population size and density, median home value; median income; employment level (number of jobs per person); and the share of single family homes (SFH) in the city (home ownership is a major aspiration in the American life, and with work-from-home policies, households may have had more flexibility to seek a location where SFH were more available). All control variables except the share of SFH are in natural log scale.

Increased migration from large to small cities

We first present the changes in the probability to relocate to cities with log-population bin \({P}^{{\prime} }\) from an origin city with log-population bin P . In Fig. 1 , we visualize the ratio \(z({P}^{{\prime} };P,\theta =1)/z({P}^{{\prime} };P,\theta =0)\) as a function of P and \({P}^{{\prime} }\) (see Section “Analysis of trend to move to smaller cities during COVID-19” and Eq. ( 4 )). We select b  = 10 equisized population bins to achieve granularity without significant sparsity (however, we find qualitatively consistent results for b  = 5,...,10). Figure 1a reveals that there is a considerable increase in the probability for movers from large U.S. cities to migrate to small cities after the pandemic started (red region in the bottom right corner of Fig. 1a ). At the same time, people from large cities were also less likely to migrate to another large city.

Panel a shows the changes in the probability z to relocate between (binned) city sizes before and during COVID-19 and suggests that movers from large cities were more likely to relocate to small cities after the pandemic started than during the 2019 baseline period (red region in the bottom right corner). Panel b shows a binned scatterplot of our parental family availability proxy v in relation to log-population (blue, left vertical axis) and net in-migration changes (grey, right vertical axis) after COVID-19 shock. The dots represent the mean vertical axis values given the horizontal axis bins (with 50 discrete, equidistant bins along the v -axis in total); error bars represent the 95% CI of the means. The grey line and blue curves are fitted regression lines for the means (linear and order-2 polynomial, respectively) with the shaded regions corresponding to the 95% CI of the regression estimates. The grey vertical axis is \(\log \left[y(\theta =1)/y(\theta =0)\right]\) , which measures how much more (or less) of an attractor the cities in each bin became after the pandemic started (larger positive values indicate that on average the cities saw larger inflow per outflow after the pandemic started). Panel c shows a time-series of the average inflow per outflow of cities (log scale) grouped by quintiles of parental family availability v (shaded regions correspond to the 95% CI of the means), suggesting proportionally high increases in net in-migration to cities in the high v -quintiles after the COVID-19 shock in April 2020 compared to the corresponding time in the prior year.

In numbers, our estimates derived from the Spectus data (see Section “Calculations of inter-city migration from Spectus data”) indicate cities that were smaller than 500,000 in population had an influx of almost 52,000 people from cities that had over 500,000 in population in excess of what was observed during the baseline period in 2019. In total, between April 2020 and December 2020, these cities saw an increase in their net in-migration by 80% as compared to the same period in 2019 (60,000 versus 100,000). In other words, the excess influx from cities larger than 500,000 in population accounts for 95% of the increase in the net in-migration to these cities whose population is smaller than 500,000. Meanwhile, the top 10 largest cities saw twice as much net out-migration between April 2020 and December 2020 as compared to the same period in 2019 (− 82,000 versus − 45,600).

If it is the case that part of this migration change is due to by family-driven migration, the increased migration to smaller cities may have followed as a consequence of the uneven distribution of family availability across the U.S. (McLeod et al. 2023 ), where people in larger cities are less likely to have non-coresident family living nearby (hence would migrate elsewhere towards family). And because of the population distribution of cities in the U.S., in which the total number of people living across all cities with population size in a bin around P decays with P (Ioannides and Skouras, 2013 ), there is a bias in the direction of more extended family being located in cities with progressively smaller P . To see if this is a valid line of inquiry (i.e., to check the premise), we determine if individuals or households made the decision to “move back home” to be closer to family at a higher rate once the pandemic started in comparison to the pre-pandemic period.

Micro-level dynamics of “moving back home”

We analyze the rates λ m ( t ), where m   ∈  {1,2,3}, at which the three types of return-to-home migration we classified in the IPUMS USA microdata occurred in each year t between 2016 and 2021 (for methodology, see Investigation 1, Section “Investigation 1: micro-level analysis of return-to-home movers”). Table 1 provides a summary of these move types and their corresponding λ m ( t ). If parental households became a more important “insurance” destination under the COVID-19 crisis, we should expect to see a spike in λ 1 in the year 2020. Similarly, we should see increases in λ 2 and λ 3 after 2019.

In Fig. 2a , we indeed observe a jump in the Type 1 migration rate λ 1 in 2020. However, this rate dropped back to pre-pandemic levels in 2021. A possible interpretation of this result is that individuals who were able to (and perhaps needed to) move back in with their parents did so promptly after the pandemic started.

Panel a shows the rate for individual movers to move into their parents’ households ( λ 1 , Type 1 movers in the microdata); Panel b shows the rate for individual movers to move back to their place of birth (POB) from elsewhere but not joining their parents’ household ( λ 2 , Type 2 movers). Panel c shows λ 3 , the rates for Type 3 moves, i.e., family household units moving back to their native place from elsewhere.

Analyzing the demographics of Type 1 movers in our IPUMS USA samples, we find that they tend to be young (median age of 25) and have low income (mean income of $25,266). More than half of them did not have a college degree, and about 60% were employed. Interestingly, the mean and median income of movers, as well as the percentage of college degree holders, were higher in 2020 and 2021 than in pre-pandemic years.

On the other hand, λ 2 , capturing the rate for Type 2 moves in which individuals moved to place of birth from elsewhere, saw a decrease in 2020 but an increase in 2021 (Fig. 2b ). While not attempting to provide an explanation, a possible interpretation is that those individuals who did not have the option to move in with parents waited until 2021 to move back to their native state. Compared to Type 1 movers, Type 2 movers tended to be older (median age 29) and with a higher mean income. Similar to Type 1 movers, the mean and median income of Type 2 movers, as well as the proportion of college degree holders, were higher in 2020 and 2021 than in pre-pandemic years.

In Fig. 2c , we observe an increase in λ 3 in 2020, and even a larger one in 2021, indicating that the pattern for family households to move back to their native states from elsewhere (Type 3 moves) increased in prevalence in 2020 and continued to do so in 2021. Plausibly, relocating an entire family household requires more logistical planning and “wait-and-see”, which could help explain the continued increase in the rate to move back to native place.

An interesting temporal-demographic dynamic we observe is that households that performed Type 3 moves in 2021 tended to have slightly older householders compared to prior years. Moreover, compared to prior years, a smaller proportion of family movers in 2020 and 2021 had eldest children who were younger than 5 or between 5 and 10 years old, but a slightly larger proportion of them had eldest children who were in their teens. Since this indicates that, proportionally, Type 3 movers comprised slightly more of householders who are at the end of their child-rearing years, it may provide a modest support for the possibility that eldercare was somewhat a more prominent driver of family-related migration at the time.

Finally, we note that the demographics of movers here conform to our expectations (that they tend be inbetween their twenties and forties), which also helps to validate study assumptions that we rely on when constructing our family proxy variable v in our next analysis.

Cities with greater parental family availability observed larger positive changes in net in-migration

Up to now, we have shown that people moved more to smaller places and that moves towards place of origin also increased. In this section, we show in more detail that the parental family availability variable v i is both negatively correlated with population size and positively correlated with an increase in net in-migration during the pandemic in comparison to the baseline pre-pandemic period (Investigation 2, see Section “Investigation 2: city-level analysis of parental family availability, population size, and net migration”).

Before analyzing v i , we explore how it relates to the only other known systematic quantity about distribution of family in the U.S. Namely, we check how v i relates to ϕ i , another estimate constructed by McLeod et al. ( 2023 ) of the probability that an individual living in city i reports having non-household family nearby. We note that ϕ is not employed more broadly in this article because it is only available for 258 CBSAs, whereas our proxy v is calculated for all CBSAs in the U.S.

Following the methodology in McLeod et al. ( 2023 ), we perform a modal regression of v i as a function of ϕ i . Modal regression identifies the typical behavior of a random variable as a function of some independent variable using a smoothing kernel, picking up functional relationships that traditional regressions may otherwise miss (Chen et al. 2016 ). The method constructs 2-d kernel density estimates (KDE) (Hastie et al. 2009 ) from our set of data points ( ϕ i ,  v i ). We use a Gaussian smoothing kernel and a bandwidth calculated using the Silverman method (Silverman 1986 ) for the kernel density estimator. Then, conditioned on each value on the horizontal axis ( ϕ ), it calculates the conditional density of the KDE along the vertical axis ( v ), and extracts the local mode of the conditional density. These local modes of v are displayed as the white curve in Fig. 3 (values of KDE are visualized using a color scale). Figure 3 shows that our parental family availability proxy v is monotonically related to ϕ , i.e. cities with larger ϕ also tend to have larger values of v .

A heatmap showing normalized density of our parental availability proxy variable v conditioned on the general family availability ϕ obtained from McLeod et al. ( 2023 ) (see Section “Cities with greater parental family availability observed larger positive changes in net in-migration” for discussion and methodology).

Now, relating v i to city log-population size in Fig. 1b (blue curve, left vertical axis), we find that parental family availability exhibits a decaying trend with city population (i.e., the share of households whose householders can be parents to adult children are larger in small cities than in large cities), which is consistent with the finding in McLeod et al. ( 2023 ) for general family availability ϕ .

Grouping cities by quintiles of parental family availability v , we see a notable increase in y i ( t ), a measure of net flux into city i , for those cities in the top three quintiles right after COVID-19 broke out in the U.S. when compared to the corresponding time period the year prior (Fig. 1c ). A similar pattern is not seen in the bottom v -quintile.

In Fig. 1b (grey line), we observe: (a) an increasing relationship between v i and \(\log \left[{y}_{i}(\theta =1)/{y}_{i}(\theta =0)\right]\) , and (b) \(\log \left[{y}_{i}(\theta =1)/{y}_{i}(\theta =0)\right] > 0\) for cities with greater levels of parental availability. This indicates that, for those cities with greater parental family availability v , their net influx tended to be larger during the pandemic compared to before. (By definition, the larger y i ( θ ) is, the larger the inflow per outflow; hence, y i ( θ  = 1)/ y i ( θ  = 0) > 1 indicates that inflow per outflow was larger during the pandemic than before).

These results are consistent with our proposition that kin partially drove the migration changes that we see at the population level. However, other population effects may be at play. For example, lower population density and cost of living may be driving people to move to smaller cities which tends to coincide with larger v i . To perform a more in-depth test of the situation, we next estimate the empirical model, described in Section “Investigation 3: empirical model”, with these factors as control variables.

Empirical model

We show the results of our empirical model (Eq. ( 9 )) in Table 2 . In all of the models with different sets of control variables, our coefficient of interest, β , is positive and statistically significant (bold numbers in Table 2) . This strongly indicates that cities with greater parental family availability, v , saw a larger increase in inflow per outflow. The result from Fig. 1b suggested that having greater parental family availability led a city to one of three scenarios: (i) in-migration was larger during the pandemic period compared to before; or (ii) out-migration was lower during the pandemic period; or (iii) a combination of the two previous scenarios. The regression results suggest that these scenarios would happen to a greater extent for cities with larger v compared to cities with smaller v . The complete model, Model (4), estimates that a city that is 10 percentage points larger in v than another city would see a 6.5% larger (positive) change in inflow per outflow after the pandemic started.

The coefficients of the controls in each model align with our intuition of the general relocation behavior during the pandemic. For example, we expected that both population (Models (2) and (3)) and median home value (Models (3) and (4)) would have a significant negative effect on the dependent variable as movers sought less populated and cheaper destinations. We also find that the share of SFH has a positive effect on the dependent variable.

Overall, our empirical results support the proposition that kin ties played a role in the shift in migration to smaller cities during the COVID-19 pandemic. To the best of our knowledge, such an attempt to connect pandemic-migration to non-coresident family has not been done. Our study adds to both the migration literature and the family ties perspective by showing that while socioeconomic and physical factors such as population density and cost of living may have been at play in pandemic-migration, the picture would be incomplete if family ties are neglected (Table 2) . The migrational mechanism that this study casts light upon may help in migration modeling–for example, family ties or place of nativity for subpopulations could be incorporated in models such as the generalized gravity model for human migration (Park et al. 2018 ).

Qualitatively, if the migration decision process is thought of as “a hierarchically ordered set of values” or priorities (Miller, 1976 ), our study suggests that family became more highly ranked against other factors in a systemic crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The fact that we see increased out-migration from large cities and increased migration towards family or place of nativity after the pandemic started supports previous literature findings (Miller, 1976 ) that economic aspirations and extended family proximity are in tension. At the same time, this would suggest that the comparative success of large cities (see, e.g., the literature on the scaling of productivity and innovation with city size Bettencourt et al. 2007 ) may come at a social and personal cost to individuals who have moved to these cities: they may have needed to replace relatively distant kin with local non-kin in their social network due to the cost of maintaining distant relationships, losing much of the remarkable support family provides–see also David-Barrett ( 2019 ) who explains this phenomenon.

Beyond these contributions, our study advances the emerging study of the demography-disasters nexus. As is argued by Karácsonyi et al. ( 2021 ), perhaps even more important than enumerating death tolls, “the key to understanding impacts [of disasters] and avoiding them in the future is to understand the relationships between disasters and population change, both prior to and after a disaster.” Our observations linking city population to certain trends in population realignment show how the heterogeneity in the location of extended family across the U.S. is a source of vulnerability for cities. This heterogeneity, which existed prior to the pandemic, may be due to differences in demographic, socioeconomic, or infrastructural factors. Better social or institutional support for those lacking local non-coresident family could potentially help to mitigate the effects. On the other hand, this pandemic-migration may also contribute to irreversible changes in talent availability, real estate usage, and the growth of certain industries. In this regard, future research may focus on understanding these consequences in the long run.

At the destination cities, the prioritization of face-to-face interactions with family during the lockdown stages of the pandemic suggested by survey data (see Feehan and Mahmud, 2021 ) might have led to elevated transmission risks in these smaller cities and, when looked at together with other factors, may help to explain why these cities experienced comparatively worse epidemiological outcomes than in large, dense cities in later waves (Cheng et al. 2020 ; Koh et al. 2020 ; Pew Research Center, 2022 ). These epidemiological consequences can be long-lasting if we consider, e.g., the increased prevalence of long-COVID.

Our study is not without limitations. Most notably, part of our results rely on proxy variables of family because other large-scale data are not available that allow us to directly construct networks of movers and their family ties that also contain detailed geographic information. To this end, we combine multiple analyses at different levels in this study to provide more robust evidence of the effects of family on pandemic-migration. The lack of better data about extended family location is compatible with well-justified needs for individual privacy. At the same time, it does suggest that better sources of data that explore the spatial distribution of family across the U.S. are needed. The last systematic study of extended family across the U.S. was the now-discontinued National Survey of Families and Households; other access-controlled surveys such as the Panel Study on Income Dynamics are helpful albeit on a smaller scale. Our results are mostly with respect to parental family, but the effects could be larger if we include other extended kin—here, again, new data would enable us to gain more insights (Furstenberg, 2020 ).

To summarize, in this study we present coherent empirical evidence, using multiple sources of data, that the increased preference to migrate to smaller cities may be partly driven by the increased migration towards non-coresident family, coupled with the heterogeneous distribution of family ties in the U.S. in which people are more likely to have family ties located in smaller cities (McLeod et al. 2023 ). On a larger scale, our study amplifies ongoing literature highlighting the role of broader kinship systems (not limited to just the nuclear family) in macro-level socioeconomic phenomena (David-Barrett, 2019 ; David-Barrett et al. 2023 ; Furstenberg, 2020 ; Reed et al. 2023 ).

Data availability

The U.S. Census, IPUMS USA, Geocorr, and BEA data sets used in this study are publicly available and can be downloaded from the respective organizations’ websites. The Spectus data were used under licence for the current study and are not publicly available. The code used to perform analyses of publicly available data during the current study is available at the archived online repository https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10935991 (Kan, 2024 ).

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Acknowledgements

We thank Spectus for providing the relocation data, as well as Brennan Lake and Éadaoin Ilten for interfacing on behalf of Spectus. We are also grateful to Professors Noel D. Johnson, David W. S. Wong, and Sam G. B. Roberts for their helpful comments.

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Unchitta Kan, Jericho McLeod & Eduardo López

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Conceptualization: UK, EL; Methodology: UK, JM, EL; Software: UK, JM; Investigation: UK; Supervision: EL; Writing- original draft: UK; Writing- review and editing: UK, JM, EL.

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We accessed our GPS-based relocation data under a strict agreement with Spectus; the agreement precludes attempts to de-anonymize or disaggregate the data. Spectus reviewed our current study prior to journal submission. While the IPUMS USA data are publicly available, we follow Census Bureau principles by using these data solely for statistical purposes and not attempting to disaggregate or identify any individual within the data samples.

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Kan, U., McLeod, J. & López, E. Non-coresident family as a driver of migration change in a crisis: the case of the COVID-19 pandemic. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 11 , 503 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03020-6

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Top Ten Family Law Cases from the Last Ten Years

To help celebrate family lawyer magazine’s tenth anniversary, here is a top ten list of the most important/influential family law cases over the last decade..

To help celebrate Family Lawyer Magazine’s tenth anniversary, here is a top 10 list of the most important/influential family law cases over the last decade.

By Laura W. Morgan , Family Law Consultant

It was also difficult to decide which state cases to include. Sometimes, a state supreme court will issue a decision that is decidedly influential, because other states adopt the reasoning of the ruling. Tropea v. Tropea , 87 N.Y.2d 727, 665 N.E.2d 145, 642 N.Y.S.2d 575 (1996), which set out the standard for considering the relocation of the custodial parent, comes to mind. It can be hard, however, to predict if a recent state supreme court will be influential because influence takes time. We may not know if a decision issued by a state supreme court today is truly influential until years from now.

With these caveats in mind, here is my top ten list of important/influential family law cases over the last ten years. Reasonable minds may differ.

Top 10 Family Law Cases from the Last 10 Years

United states supreme court cases.

• Fulton v. City of Philadelphia , 141 S. Ct. 1868 (June 17, 2021). The City of Philadelphia contracts with private agencies to certify and support foster parents. City contracts and ordinances prohibited these agencies from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. When Catholic Social Services refused to commit to certifying same-sex foster parents, Philadelphia refused to renew its contract. Catholic Social Services sued, arguing the city violated the First Amendment by forcing CSS to either espouse support for same-sex marriage or abandon its charitable mission. Philadelphia argued CSS could not claim a right to serve as a City contractor while refusing to follow anti-discrimination rules designed to meet the City’s duty to protect LGBTQ children and parents in the foster care system. The Supreme Court held that the city violated CSS’s right to free exercise. The Court reasoned that the Philadelphia law was not neutral and generally applicable because it allowed for exceptions to the anti-discrimination requirement at the sole discretion of the Commissioner. Additionally, CSS’s actions do not fall within public accommodations laws because certification as a foster parent is not “made available to the public” in the usual sense of the phrase. Thus, the non-discrimination requirement is subject to strict scrutiny, which requires that the government show the law is necessary to achieve a compelling government interest. The government failed in that showing. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-123_new_9olb.pdf
• Monasky v. Taglieri, 140 S. Ct. 719 (February 25, 2020). The first question presented concerned the standard for habitual residence: Is an actual agreement between the parents on where to raise their child categorically necessary to establish an infant’s habitual residence? The Supreme Court held that the determination of habitual residence does not turn on the existence of an actual agreement. The second question was: What is the appropriate standard of appellate review of an initial adjudicator’s habitual-residence determination? The Court held that neither the Convention nor ICARA prescribed modes of appellate review, other than the directive to act “expeditiously.” The first-instance habitual-residence determination under the Hague Convention was subject to deferential appellate review for “clear error.” Thus, under the Hague Convention, a child’s “habitual residence”  depends on the totality of the circumstances specific to the case, not on categorical requirements such as an actual agreement between the parties, and such a determination is subject to review for clear error. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-935_new_fd9g.pdf
• Sveen v. Melin , 138 S. Ct. 1815 (June 11, 2018). Mark A. Sveen and Kaye L. Melin were married in 1997. Sveen purchased a life insurance policy that year, and the following year he named Melin the primary beneficiary, and his children the contingent beneficiaries. Sveen and Melin divorced in 2007, and Sveen died in 2011. Meanwhile, Minnesota had changed its probate code in 2002 to apply a revocation-upon-divorce statute to life insurance beneficiary designations. Sveen had never changed the designation on his life insurance policy, and Melin was therefore still listed as the primary beneficiary at the time of his death. The Supreme Court held that Minnesota’s automatic-revocation-on-divorce statute did not substantially impair pre-existing contractual arrangements, and thus, application of the statute to revoke the ex-wife’s primary beneficiary designation under life insurance policy that was made before statute’s enactment did not violate the Contracts Clause of the Constitution. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-1432_7j8b.pdf
• Sessions v. Morales-Santana , 137 S. Ct. 1678 (June 12, 2017). In this case, the Supreme Court cured the unequal treatment of children born to unwed U.S.-citizen fathers by extending a burden to children of unwed U.S.-citizen mothers. The particular statute at issue in the case regulates the transmission of citizenship from American parents to their foreign-born children at birth, a form of citizenship known today as derivative citizenship. When those children are born outside marriage, the derivative citizenship statute makes it more difficult for American fathers, as compared with American mothers, to transmit citizenship to their foreign-born children. Morales-Santana’s constitutional challenge required the Justices to grapple with two crucial and contested issues: the extent to which constitutional gender equality principles govern regulation and recognition of family relationships and the nature of the judiciary’s role in the enforcement of the Constitution at the border. The Supreme Court declared that the law governing the acquisition of citizenship violates equal protection principles. They remedied the equal protection violation by “leveling down”: that is, rather than giving unmarried fathers and their children the benefit of the more generous standard in the citizenship statute, the Court nullified that standard for unmarried American mothers and their children. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1191_2a34.pdf
• Howell v. Howell , 137 S. Ct. 1400 (May 15, 2017). A veteran’s ex-wife filed a motion to enforce the divorce decree’s division of military retirement pay after the veteran waived a portion of such pay in order to collect nontaxable service-related disability benefits. The Supreme Court held that states were prohibited from increasing, pro rata, the amount a divorced spouse received each month from his/her veteran’s retirement pay in order to indemnify the divorced spouse to restore that portion of retirement pay lost due to veteran’s post-divorce waiver of retirement pay to receive service-related disability benefits. The Court did not rule out the parties agreeing to such indemnification, although later cases have misinterpreted Howell to so hold. The Court also did not rule out increasing alimony to account for the lost property benefit. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/16pdf/15-1031_hejm.pdf
• Obergefell v. Hodges , 576 U.S. 644, 135 S. Ct. 2584 (June 26, 2015). The Supreme Court held that the Constitution entitles same-sex couples to civil marriage “on the same terms and conditions as opposite-sex couples.” As we all know, the game-changing nature of this decision cannot be overstated. This decision led to Pavan v. Smith, ___ U.S. ___, 137 S. Ct. 2075 (June 16, 2017), which held that an Arkansas statute that denied married same-sex couples access to the constellation of benefits that Arkansas linked to marriage was unconstitutional to the extent that the statute treated same-sex couples differently from opposite-sex couples. (The Arkansas statute generally required the name of the mother’s male spouse to appear on the child’s birth certificate when the mother conceived the child by means of artificial insemination, but allowed omission of the mother’s female spouse from her child’s birth certificate.) www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf
• U.S. v. Windsor , 570 U.S. 744, 133 S. Ct. 2675 (June 26, 2013). In many ways, this case teed up Obergefell. The Supreme Court ruled that Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) is unconstitutional and that the federal government cannot discriminate against married lesbian and gay couples for the purposes of determining federal benefits and protections. In a nutshell, Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer were married in Canada. New York state, where the parties lived, recognized their marriage as valid. When Thea died, the federal government refused to recognize their marriage and taxed Edie’s inheritance from Thea as though they were strangers. Edie challenged DOMA, alleging that DOMA violates the Equal Protection principles of the U.S. Constitution because it recognizes existing marriages of heterosexual couples, but not of same-sex couples, despite the fact that New York State treats all marriages the same. On June 26, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Section 3 of DOMA is unconstitutional and that the federal government cannot discriminate against married lesbian and gay couples for the purposes of determining federal benefits and protections. www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/12-307_6j37.pdf

Cases from the Federal Court of Appeals

• Brackeen v. Haaland , 994 F.3d 249 (5th Cir. April 6, 2021). I have included this case because the United States Supreme Court granted certiorari on February 28, 2022. In this case, Texas, Indiana, Louisiana, and individual plaintiffs sued the federal government, contending that the Indian Child Welfare Act is unconstitutional. The Cherokee Nation, Oneida Nation, Quinault Indian Nation, and Morongo Band of Mission Indians intervened in the case. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, hearing the case en banc, held that parts of the law were constitutional and parts were unconstitutional: 1) ICWA’s mandatory placement preferences violated equal protection; 2) provision of ICWA granting Indian tribes authority to reorder congressionally enacted adoption placement preferences violated non-delegation doctrine; 3) ICWA provision requiring states to apply federal standards to state-created claims commandeered the states in violation of the Tenth Amendment; 4) Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) exceeded its statutory authority in promulgating regulations, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act (APA); 5) BIA regulations were not entitled to Chevron deference; and 6) prospective and adoptive parents whose adoptions were open to collateral attack under ICWA had no fundamental right to care, custody, and control of children in their care. Look for the Supreme Court decision in the future. www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/18/18-11479-CV2.pdf
• Andochick v. Byrd , 709 F.3d 296 (4th Cir. March 4, 2013), cert. denied, 134 S. Ct. 235 (2013). In Kennedy v. Plan Administrator for DuPont Savings & Investment Plan, 555 U.S. 285, 129 S. Ct. 865, 172 L. Ed.2d 662 (2009), the Supreme Court held that an ERISA plan administrator must distribute benefits to the beneficiary named in the plan, notwithstanding the fact that the named beneficiary signed a waiver disclaiming her right to the benefits. The Kennedy Court left open the question of whether, once the benefits were distributed by the administrator, the plan participant’s estate could enforce the named beneficiary’s waiver against her. In Andochick, the Fourth Circuit took up the question left open by Kennedy and held that ERISA does not preempt “post- distribution suits to enforce state-law waivers“ against ERISA beneficiaries. Thus, wife number one and wife number two are free to duke it out with each other. www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/121728.P.pdf

State Supreme Court Cases

• Stone v. Thompson , 428 S.C. 79, 82, 833 S. E.2d 266, 267 (July 24, 2019), reh’g denied (Oct. 16, 2019). A wave of statutes across the country in the 1960s and 1970s abolished common law marriage. One of the last holdouts was South Carolina. This decision abolished common law marriage in South Carolina. “Our review in this case has prompted us to take stock of common-law marriage as a whole in South Carolina. We have concluded the institution’s foundations have eroded with the passage of time, and the outcomes it produces are unpredictable and often convoluted. Accordingly, we believe the time has come to join the overwhelming national trend and abolish it.“ This decision may be the bellwether for the remaining holdouts to abolish common law marriage. www.sccourts.org/opinions/HTMLFiles/SC/27908.pdf

Laura W. Morgan, Esq., is the owner/operator of Family Law Consulting in Amherst, Massachusetts. She provides legal research, writing, and advocacy services; legal memoranda; precis of transcripts; and other written products for trial or appellate court advocacy to family lawyers nationwide. www.famlawconsult.com

Related Article:

Defining “Habitual Residence” in the Hague Convention SCOTUS defined “habitual residence” and proclaimed a uniform legal standard for the first time – altering the trajectory of U.S. Hague Convention jurisprudence on this issue.

A Tale of Two Family Law Appeals For the family lawyer, these cases illustrate the importance of creating and “protecting” the record in the course of a trial or other evidentiary hearing.

U.S. Supreme Court Tackles Discrimination Against Same-Sex Couples Laura W. Morgan, the owner of Family Law Consulting, sums up the constitutional developments in the cases of discrimination against same-sex couples.

About the Author

Diana Shepherd, CDFA®

Diana Shepherd has over 30 years of experience as a marketing, branding, SEO, copywriting, editing, and publishing expert. As Content Director for Family Lawyer Magazine, Divorce Magazine , and Divorce Marketing Group , she oversees all corporate content development and frequently creates SEO-friendly videos, podcasts, and copy for family law and financial firms. The Co-Founder of Divorce Magazine and Divorce Marketing Group, Diana is an award-winning editor, published author, and a nationally recognized expert on divorce, remarriage, finance, and stepfamily issues. She has written hundreds of articles geared towards both family law professionals and divorcing people, and she has both performed and taught on-page SEO for 20+ years. Diana spent eight years as the Marketing Director for the Institute for Divorce Financial Analysts® (IDFA®), and she has been a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst® since 2006. While at IDFA, she wrote, designed, and published  The IDFA Marketing Guide , and she also created seminars for CDFA professionals to present to family lawyers (approved for CLE), as well as to separated and divorcing individuals. She has represented both DMG and IDFA at industry conferences and events across North America, and she has given marketing as well as divorce financial seminars at many of those conferences.

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Dark Smoke Billows From Fire at Boston Construction Site

Smoke darkened the sky after a fire broke out at a construction site near Boston’s South Station on April 9.

According to local news outlet WFXT , the job site has since been shut down for a safety audit. No injuries were reported .

Supercell Looms Over Austin Amid Severe Thunderstorms

A large supercell was spotted over Austin, Texas, as a line of severe storms moved through the region. Storyful footage captures the ominous storm cloud hovering in the sky as lightning flashes.

Race on to Save Entangled Whale Spotted Off California Coast

A gray whale tangled in netting connected to two buoys would “likely die,” according to the NOAA, unless crews were able to free it.

Pub Door Opens ‘Directly Into the Sea’ as High Tide Floods Cornwall Town

The owner of a Cornish pub found the door of her premises opening “directly into the sea” recently as she went to check her flood board.

Owner Ellie Gray recorded the moment she checked that the board she set across the door was stopping the water from coming in, with video showing a tumultuous flow running down the main street.

“We opened the door to see how high the tide was … It was higher and rougher than we thought,” she said.

Storm Sends Huge Waves Over Seawall in Brittany

High tides combined with Storm Pierrick brought some spectacular conditions to France’s Brittany region, with video capturing massive waves crashing over a seawall on April 9.

The impressive visuals were recorded by Alexis Saubois, who told Storyful that although high tides are “always exceptional” in Saint-Malo, Storm Pierrick added to what he called a “Dantesque” spectacle.

Several Family Members of Hamas Leader Reported Killed in Gaza

At least five family members of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh were killed in an Israeli airstrike while traveling for Eid al-Fitr west of Gaza City on April 10, according to Gaza’s government media office .

The car was carrying several of Haniyeh’s sons and grandchildren, Al Jazeera reported , and published video it said shows the grisly scene of the strike. Haniyeh confirmed the deaths of three of his sons, the outlet reported.

Video showing a burnt-out car was captured by local journalist Nedal Ahmed, who said it shows the aftermath of the strike.

Severe Storms Cause Flooding on Louisiana Roads

Newswire by Storyful’s April 2024 Highlights https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7rQe2k0voU Heavy rain triggered flash flooding in southern Louisiana. Video taken by Lilliam Terrell shows vehicles navigating a flooded Highway 190 in Covington.

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Map shows alleged Ballarat murders of Hannah McGuire, Samantha Murphy part of bigger gendered violence issue

Analysis Map shows alleged Ballarat murders of Hannah McGuire, Samantha Murphy part of bigger gendered violence issue

"What the hell is going on in Ballarat?"

Many versions of this question, with varying levels of expletives, have echoed across Victoria and Australia in the past day or two.

It is a fair question — the regional Victorian city has been hit by more tragedy and trauma in the past two months than you would expect in a place with a population of around 110,000 people.

On February 4, 51-year-old woman Samantha Murphy disappeared after heading off for a jog.

On February 16, mother-of-five Rebecca Young was found dead in a Sebastopol home, the victim of a suspected murder-suicide.

On February 22, bushfires west of Ballarat destroyed seven homes, forced mass evacuations, and turned the sky over the city an apocalyptic red.

On March 7, Patrick Orren Stephenson was charged with Ms Murphy's murder .

On March 13, a rockfall at Ballarat Gold Mine killed miner Kurt Hourigan .

And on April 5, the body of 23-year-old Clunes woman Hannah McGuire was found in a burnt-out car in bushland south-west of Ballarat, and her ex-boyfriend Lachlan Young was charged with murder over her death.

The events of the past 61 days have cast a pall of shock, grief, and confusion over the city.

So many people have been left in mourning, reeling from the loss of their loved ones, their friends, their homes.

It's unclear whether anyone is at fault following the bushfires and the mining rockfall, which is no solace to those who have suffered deep losses because of them.

But three women are dead following two tragic months, and each is alleged to have been murdered by a man, with two very young men before the courts, charged in relation to two of those deaths.

Not just a Ballarat problem

Of the 18 Australian women allegedly killed by men this year, three have died in the Ballarat region.

To put that another way, the lives of 16 per cent of all women allegedly killed by men in Australia this year are believed to have ended in the Ballarat region.

It may sound like an unlikely figure, but the reality is that data shows the rate of family violence in the Victorian town is higher than state and national averages.

Which brings us back to the original question: what the hell is going on in Ballarat?

In 2021, the rate of family violence common assault in Ballarat was approximately 12 per cent higher than across the state, according to crime statistics.

But these latest events are something new and even more frightening.

The Victorian government's crime data shows that in five of the past 10 years in Ballarat, there were three or fewer homicides.

And now three women are believed to have been murdered in Ballarat in the space of 61 days.

But this is not just a Ballarat problem. Across Australia, a woman is killed by a man every nine days.

Premier Jacinta Allan put it succinctly on Tuesday.

"It's only April 9 and already 18 Australian women have been killed in 2024," she said.

"This is unacceptable and it has to stop."

So what is going on in Ballarat?

What's going on in Ballarat is the same thing that is happening everywhere, just in a more condensed period of time.

Take a look at the Red Heart Campaign , a remarkable memorial that tracks the women and children lost to violence.

Award-winning journalist Sherele Moody has put together a map that she regularly updates.

It features a red heart for every murder, with details on who the victim was and how they died.

When you zoom out and look at the whole of Australia, the number of red hearts is overwhelming.

Samantha Murphy is on there. Rebecca Young is on there. Hannah McGuire will no doubt be added soon.

These three women have died, allegedly at the hands of men, in tragedies that could have been avoided.

These deaths didn't need to happen, and they are the latest examples of a major problem facing Australia.

Gendered violence is very much alive in Ballarat and Samantha Murphy, Rebecca Young, and Hannah McGuire are not here because of it.

Matt Neal is the editor of ABC Ballarat.

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• Courts and Trials
• Domestic Violence
• Women’s Rights