Data base or public survey involving health conditions of immigrants in the USA

[Marcos Almeida]

Dear Forum Members,

I know this is not a question about Stata but I wonder whether you could help me with some advice.

I wish to explore public data (or multiple data sets) where I could get information concerning health status (also, risk factors, or mortality, or illnesses) concerning Brazilian immigrants (adults, or elderly, or women, etc.) living in the USA (or according to the states, or in a couple of states).

It can be a particular issue (say, mothers and delivery) or a broad perspective.

Ideally, the data should come from an overarching dataset, where I could select the information about other immigrants as well as the native population, preferrably beyond 2000.

The data may not be necessarily .dta, since I intend to import to Stata afterwards.

Thank you in advance for any suggestion.

[Weiwen Ng]

Marcos,

If you are focusing on Brazilian immigrants to the US, it might be challenging to find data. In the federally funded publicly available datasets, if specific countries of origin or specific preferred languages were recorded, the information might be coarsened (e.g. everyone from anywhere in South America gets aggregated, everyone whose preferred language is not English or Spanish gets aggregated). Some more detailed information might be available in restricted data sets that are not public, and that require some sort of data use agreement with the survey sponsor (e.g. the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sponsor the National Health Interview Survey).

The American Community Survey may be able to get you information on people indicating that they were born in Brazil, but there's not much health data in the ACS. The Migration Policy Institute may know more.

From what I can tell, the Medical Expenditures Panel Survey and the National Health Interview Survey have more detailed information on Hispanic origin/identity. The available sub-groups do not include Brazilian - there is a flag for Central or South American (as opposed to Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican Republic, or all other Hispanic). Both surveys can be downloaded from the Minnesota Population Center.

There may have been non-national epidemiological surveys conducted by universities that have focused on geographic regions where many Brazilian immigrants are, and that might be another place to look. It's also possible that there has been some sort of cohort study of Brazilian Americans, but I wouldn't know where to search for that. I'm not sure how helpful all that is. The US is a big country, and I am pretty sure that most immigrants from elsewhere in the Americas are of Mexican ancestry. Maybe it's worth contacting the Migration Policy Institute to see if they know of any researchers who have approached this topic. Also, you could try emailing Solange Simoes - she's a professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University, and I had her sociology class at the University of Michigan (U of M and EMU are in adjacent towns/cities).

[Weiwen Ng]

... Also, you could try emailing Solange Simoes - she's a professor of sociology at Eastern Michigan University, and I had her sociology class at the University of Michigan (U of M and EMU are in adjacent towns/cities).

Clarification: Simoes is Brazilian-American, which I know from having had her sociology class (she said this up front). I do not know if she has any experience with publicly available data sets.

[Marcos Almeida]

Weiwen Ng : thank you so much for your insightful message, it was really helpful! I’ll follow the tips you shared. Hopefully I’ll find so data to work with.

[wbuchanan]

It may not be exactly related, but maybe there would be something in the Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study data sets?

[Marcos Almeida]

wbuchanan Thank you for mentioning it, I will check it out!