This project seeks to generate new large-scale nationally representative public-use data for the United States that are crucial for conducting scientific and policy-relevant research on (1) immigrant health and mortality and (2) how immigration contributes to racial/ethnic disparities in health and mortality. It will link the foreign-born respondents from eight different years of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), including persons who have previously been linked by NCHS to records from the National Death Index (NDI), to Office of Immigration Statistics (OIS) records containing data on class of admission and immigrant legal permanent residence (LPR) and naturalization status from 1973 to 2008. When pooled across years, the resulting linked data set will contain hundreds of thousands of cases (including over 100,000 foreign born);will include information about individual respondents'health, health care coverage and utilization (and for the foreign born class of admission, LPR and naturalization statuses and the timing of changes in these statuses);and will contain information on mortality data from the National Death Index through 2006, making it possible to tell whether and when a respondent died as well as cause of death. The project will also assess the quality of the NHIS-OIS matches, estimate health and mortality differentials by immigrant entry, class of admission, LPR and naturalization statuses, and assess the likely range of estimates given uncertainty in the accuracy of some of the matches. These newly linked health, mortality and immigration data will enable researchers for the first time to assess a wide array of child and adult risk behaviors and health and mortality outcomes for the U.S. foreign-born population and numerous national-origin groups by entry status (unauthorized versus legal), the legally entering population by class of admission and adjustment to LPR status, and for the LPR population by naturalization status. Such critical descriptive information - together with the analytical research the new data will spawn - will provide the kind of detailed profile of immigrant health and mortality and stimulate the kinds of pathbreaking research necessary for advancing scientific knowledge about the origins of U.S. racial/ethnic health and mortality disparities. The GO funding mechanism is appropriate for the proposed project because it will produce valuable new scientific and policy-relevant health and mortality data that will be made available to the larger research community. Record linkages such as those proposed here have the potential for enormous pay-off at modest cost since they take advantage of already-collected and linked health and mortality data and detailed administrative information about immigration and naturalization status that is difficult to collect retrospectively from respondents in an accurate and inexpensive manner. The availability of the NHIS-NDI-OIS linked data will open up new avenues of research on both immigrant health and mortality and help to address important questions about how immigration contributes to racial/ethnic group health disparities that have proven impossible to address with existing nationally-representative data.
This project seeks to generate new large-scale nationally representative public-use data for the United States that are crucial for conducting scientific and policy-relevant research on (1) immigrant health and mortality and (2) how immigration contributes to racial/ethnic disparities in health and mortality. Immigration is reshaping the U.S. population, and immigrant health holds particularly important implications for understanding racial and ethnic disparities in health and mortality. The availability of the data will open up new avenues of research on both immigrant health and mortality and help to address important questions about how immigration contributes to racial/ethnic group health disparities that have proven impossible to address with existing nationally-representative data.
