Use of Census Data for Research on Refugee Resettlement in the United States
Methodological Strengths And Limitations

Miriam Potocky-Tripodi

Despite its heritage as nation of immigrants, the United States has an extremely limited systematic collection of immigration data (Levine, Hill, and Warren, 1985). It has been noted that, "There have not been innovative efforts to collect survey data on a scale comparable to those launched to study other national issues … This leaves the census as the major, and often the only, source of data for the study of contemporary immigration" (Hirschman, 1994, p. 710). Conse-quently, there have been a large number of studies using census data to examine diverse aspects of immigration such as variations in language usage (Bills, Hernandez-Chavez, and Hudson, 1995); determinants of naturalization (Yang, 1994); patterns of marriage (Biddlecom, 1993) and fertility (Kahn, 1994); characteristics of immigrant children (Hirschman, 1994; Jensen and Chitose, 1994); the impact of immigration on residential patterns in metropolitan areas (Alba, Denton, Leung, and Logan, 1995); and various facets of immigrant economic adaptation such as educational attainment and labor market experiences (Poston, 1994; Simon, 1995), poverty ( Jensen, 1991), public assistance utilization ( Jensen, 1988), and home ownership (Alba and Logan, 1992). However, few of these studies have focused specifically on refugees, suggesting that refugee scholars may be underutilizing this potentially valuable data source.