Ethnicity and Big Five personality traits: Exploring the factors influencing students’ decisions to study abroad

The present study is motivated by the consistent upward trend in international educational migration. Our case study area is a bilingual European country, Estonia. We are particularly interested in the variations in emigration intentions by Big Five personality traits and ethnicity. Migration studies do not usually control for personality traits that vary significantly by ethnic groups. Data for the study comes from the sample survey among school graduates in 2012. The results revealed remarkable differences in emigration intentions by ethnicity. Three personality traits, Extraversion, Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness, are significantly related to emigration intentions. Controlling for personality traits does not significantly change the results by ethnicity. With regard of other variables, gender, parents education, location of high school, earlier studies abroad and friends-family abroad were linked with emigration intentions. The factor analysis revealed two important groups of school graduates. Factor 1 characterizes those who would like to go abroad because studying abroad is useful, while Factor 2 characterizes those who think that Estonia does not deserve them. Estonians belong more likely to the first group while ethnic minorities belong more likely to the second group.