The journey of staying: A transitional and mobility perspective on the staying rural preferences of rural young adults

Abstract This article presents insight into rural young adults’ reflections on their past, present and future staying rural preferences (transitional perspective) and how they relate to their experiences and connections outside the rural home area (mobility perspective). Using a biographical approach, we conducted 12 semi-structured interviews with young employed adults living with their parents or alone in two rural areas in the Netherlands and Northern Ireland. Their transitional perspectives, which were agent-centred, revealed that staying rural preferences do not evolve as a uniform process, fluctuating instead between ‘messy’ periods of stability and instability, entailing multiple alternations between deliberate and ‘just-happened’ periods. In line with the ‘new mobilities paradigm’, the participants’ mobility perspectives confirmed the relevance of past residential experiences and current non-residential mobility for analysing staying preferences. The article concludes that staying rural is a complex, (unstable) evolving, spatially relational and (only partly) conscious process.