Photo: Daniel Villadsen / visitdenmark.com

2. Methodology: Survey

This research report is based on a survey that was conducted by Norstat in Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark with 1000 respondents by country and in Iceland with 500 (in total 4500 respondents) between 25-39 years of age. The working paper by Guðmundsdóttir et al. 2023 directed the research questions on which the survey was based. They are as follows:

What are the migration aspirations of people in “household creation age” in the Nordic region?
What are the characteristics of those who wish to move?
What are the key drivers of intended migration?
What can the Nordic countries and regions learn from each other in relation to internal migration?

Based on these questions, we asked the respondents to answer questions about their migration history, relationship with their place of origin, reasons for moving and about drivers for a possible future move. The exact survey questions (in English) can be found in Annex 1.

2.1 Limitations

Surveys as a method has always its own limitations, as the answers are bound to be somewhat limited and susceptible to different interpretations. For this reason, we have needed to exclude some answer groups in the analysis face to decrease the risk of an overreach in conclusions.

As another limitation, it is important to consider that the survey was designed to represent the entire country as accurately as possible. This has resulted in a more prominent representation of areas with larger populations, such as cities, and less representation of respondents living in sparsely populated regions. This creates a possible bias for more urban preferences and experiences.