Linking the Chinese Immigrants in the Raleigh- Durham area (ChIRDU) study to InfoUSA data

Immigrants in the U.S. have become increasingly dispersed across suburban areas and new destination areas, away from concentrated ethnic neighborhoods. These new patterns of residential settlement have reduced segregation within metro areas and across regions with important implications for our understanding of immigrant incorporation and spatial assimilation and the role of social networks in preserving co-ethnic social ties despite spatial dispersion.  To further investigate these relationships, this pilot will  link two waves of survey data on Chinese immigrants in the Raleigh-Durham area to housing data from InfoUSA.  The pilot will allow (1) the description of the ethnic composition of neighborhoods where members of the Chinese community reside at baseline (2018) and follow up (2020) and, in future work, (2) the overlay of these immigrants' co-ethnic social networks over the geography of InfoUSA addresses, in order to understand how social interaction data complicate or support conventional models and patterns of Chinese immigrant spatial assimilation and implications for their incorporation.  The data products will also facilitate future studies of the relationships between neighborhood characteristics, various measures of stressors (e.g., acculturative stress, everyday experience of discrimination, COVID stress, financial stress, work stress, health insurance stressors) and psychological distress, anxiety and depressions, also collected in our survey, among this population of Chinese immigrants, and whether and how local and global networks are protective against stress and other psychological health outcomes.

 

Academic Year
2021-2022
Duke Principal Investigator(s)
Primary Funding Agency
NICHD/DPRC Pilot
Award Year