Experimental evidence shows that asking about staying reduces migration aspirations in Senegal, indicating survey design impacts.
We provide causal evidence that asking about intentions to stay rather than migrate reduces expressed migration aspirations by 12 percentage points, confirming a significant "mobility framing effect" in survey responses. Researchers should consider using more balanced survey instruments when eliciting mobility intentions and may risk overestimating migration when inferring future migration flows from aspirations measured through surveys.
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Murken et al. (2026) studied this question.
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