A major stumbling block in behavioural research on residential mobility is the difficulty of specifying the decision process at the level of the individual. This paper uses multidimensional scaling analysis to analyse individual differences in residential area evaluation. Dimensions of attribute importance that describe related clusters of residential attributes are derived and the importance assigned to each dimension is calculated for each person. The method is illustratred with data derived from a questionnaire survey of women in Hamilton, Canada. The results indicate that residential areas are evaluated in terms of four dimensions referring to the preponderance of residential land uses, lot size, social character and housing quality. Stage in the family life cycle affects the importance assigned to selected dimensions. The evidence suggests that increasing compensatory preference models may not be appropriate for analyzing residential preferences.
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Valerie Preston (1982) studied this question.