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9 - Health patterns of Pacific Islanders and Asians in the United States
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- By W. Parker Frisbie, Population Research Center and Department of Sociology, College of Liberal Arts, University of Texas at Austin, 1, University Station A1700, Austin, TX 78712-0543, USA, Robert A. Hummer, The University of Texas at Austin, Population Research Center, 1, University Station G1800, Austin, TX 78712-0543, USA, T. Elizabeth Durden, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837, Youngtae Cho, School of Public Health, Seoul National University, Seoul Korea
- Edited by Ryutaro Ohtsuka, University of Tokyo, Stanley J. Ulijaszek, University of Oxford
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- Book:
- Health Change in the Asia-Pacific Region
- Published online:
- 15 September 2009
- Print publication:
- 24 May 2007, pp 192-218
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- Chapter
- Export citation
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Summary
Introduction
Any analysis of the health of the Asian and Pacific Islander (API) populations in the United States immediately confronts the obstacle that, as late as the year 2000, ‘Asian and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders have to a large degree been “invisible” in public health debates’, and that there are large gaps in our understanding of the ‘factors that influence their health and quality of life’ (Srinivasan and Guillermo 2000: 1731). A major reason for such gaps is that the comparatively small size of many API subpopulations results in data sets with an insufficient number of cases to allow stable and reliable statistical estimates. Assessing API health in the United States requires drawing on a number of different data sources across which information is not always fully consistent. With the partial exception of Hawaiians, information on specific Pacific Islander populations is especially scarce, so that it is often necessary to assess the health of this group as if it were an undifferentiated whole. In fact, much more often than is desirable, Pacific Islanders are subsumed within a combined Asian and Pacific Islander category. Nevertheless, by employing information from a number of different sources, including our own analyses, we believe a useful assessment of the physical health of the API population in the United States can be achieved.
Demographic and socioeconomic characteristics
The API population is quite heterogeneous in demographic, socioeconomic status (SES) and cultural terms, as well as in length of settlement (Srinivasan and Guillermo 2000; Barnes and Bennett 2002; Ro 2002; Reeves and Bennett 2003).