Moving, Staying, or Returning: Risk-taking Attitudes and Secondary Migration Aspirations

Abstract How do individuals decide whether to move, stay, or return after an initial displacement? While migration research increasingly explores the role of psychological traits, little is known about how risk-taking attitudes shape migration aspirations in forced migration contexts. This study bridges this gap by combining the aspiration–capabilities framework with a dual conceptualization of risk-taking attitudes: objective risk-taking, rooted in rational choice theory and measured through a hypothetical income gamble, and subjective risk-taking, defined as a self-perceived willingness to take risks in daily life. Drawing on original survey data from Syrian migrants in Turkey ( N = 844), it investigates how these two dimensions of risk-taking influence aspirations to move onward, stay, or return. Using multinomial logistic regression, the study finds that subjective risk-taking attitudes significantly predict aspirations to move onward, even after controlling for structural and demographic factors. Objective risk-taking attitudes, by contrast, show no significant relationship with any direction of migration aspiration. Aspirations to stay are more common among those who are employed, religious, and proficient in the host country’s language, while return aspirations are influenced by gender and wealth. These findings underscore the need to integrate self-perceived risks into migration theory and cast doubt on policy approaches that aim to influence migration decisions solely by altering external risk conditions.