Zwischen Multilokalität und Sesshaftigkeit. Eine Untersuchung der residenziellen Multilokalität von Geographie-Studierenden an der Universität Innsbruck unter Einfluss der Covid-19 Pandemie und Fernlehre

For almost two years until now, the Covid-19 pandemic has determined the everyday life of our entire society. In order to limit contacts to a minimum, teaching at the University of Innsbruck has changed from face-to-face teaching classes to distance learning since the beginning of the summer semester in 2020. Especially in the department of Geography of the University Innsbruck, teaching has been completely switched to distance learning. In addition, a high proportion of foreign students from Austria's neighboring countries are enrolled in this degree program. This leads to the assumption that some of the students are multi-local, i.e. residing in more than one place of residence. Besides the changes in teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic, difficulties in cross-border commuting have arisen. Concluding, this thesis work explores the question of what changes the multilocality of geography students at the University of Innsbruck undergoes due to the switch to distance learning. For this purpose, an online survey was used to question about 37 percent of the geography students regarding their living and commuting behavior before and during the Covid-19 pandemic. All data were subsequently analyzed using the statistical program SPSS. Key findings that emerged from this analysis are primarily variations in commuting frequencies during the Covid-19 pandemic. These manifested themselves in the fact that students spent more time at their primary residence and thus a large part of the time at the university location. On the other hand, it was possible to show that only a small proportion of questionees respondents experienced changes in their housing situation. Rather a persistence could be found, which can be explained by the fact that the questionees value their current housing situation and therefore do not want to change it.