Kevin Bacon moves from a big city to a small town in Middle America where dancing is outlawed. Ralph Macchio moves from New Jersey to California, where he learns the art of life and combat. Dianne Wiest moves with her two sons to a California town stocked with vampires.

The trope of American families settling in faraway places isn’t just a plotline for terrible 1980s movies, but a national phenomenon. Decades of data, including a more recent Gallup study, characterizes the United States as one of the most geographically mobile countries in the world. “About one in four U.S. adults (24 percent) reported moving within the country in the past five years,” the report noted. With the comparable exceptions of Finland (23 percent) and Norway (22 percent), Americans also move considerably more than their European peers.

The American tendency toward transience isn’t confined to long-distance movement either. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the average person in the United States moves residences more than 11 times in his or her lifetime. Though hard data is difficult to come by, according to a survey conducted by the real-estate company Re/Max earlier this year, that figure across 16 European countries is roughly four.