Comparison of Residential Location Selection Determinants between Foreign female residents and Domestic female residents using AHP

Abstract

The number of foreign population in Korea has dramatically increased over the last fifteen years. The Korean government has initiated a multicultural family policy since 2006 in order to facilitate foreigners’ effective adaptation and settling down. Prior studies have shown evidence supporting the notion that various factors are associated with individuals’ preference on residential location selection. Especially, those factors are significantly contributes to the building-up of foreign community populations which have become more conspicuous than ever before. Despite increasing concerns regarding the number of foreign-born female in Korea, too little attention is given to the residential location selection of foreign population in the previous literature. Most existing literatures are focused on the foreign workers and association with environmental characteristics; therefore, it is only speculation to the cause and effect relationship between these two objects. In contrast to prior literature, this study attempts to identify how residential decision makings are influenced by architectural, social, characteristics of socioeconomic and environments. A survey for the determinants of residential location was conducted for those who reside in Ulsan City, above 20s and non-students as potential seeker for housing. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to analyze and identify the differences and similarities of residential location selection between foreign and domestic residents. To supplement the results of the survey, an in-depth interview was conducted for further analysis. Hypothetically, we expected that the economic factors such as housing cost, investment prospects are the most important factor for both foreign-born female and domestic female residents. We hypothesized that foreign-born residents, however, are more seriously concerned about social factors such as proximity of friends and relatives, social group and same types of jobs than domestic residents. The findings indicated that (1) preferences on residential location selection between domestic and foreign-born residents are similar in general since it concern with a basic human needs; (2) main differences between foreign and domestic residents are domestic are more influenced on investment in real estate, however, foreign residents are more influenced on living costs and travel expenses. Surprisingly, the domestic residents have greater weight on the ‘where friends live’ than the foreign-born residents. In contrast, the foreign residents have a great weight on the ‘access to similar job’ than the domestic residents. The survey result shows that the social group is more important to the foreign-born residents than the domestic residents. In consistent, the in-depth interview results also indicate that the access to jobs is more important than the where friends live because it is the main source of living. From a practical perspective, this study suggests that, there is difference on residential location selection preference between the domestic female residents and the foreign-born female residents.