Intergenerational coresidence among elderly Pacific Islander Americans

Sela V. Panapasa, University of Michigan
James W. McNally, University of Michigan

From a demographic perspective, the lives of Pacific Island elders in the United States remain largely unexplored. This knowledge gap is the result of a number of factors including the difficulty in collecting statistics on small populations such as Pacific Island, migration and fluid patterns of self identification. Using the recently released 2000 Census PUMS files this paper presents baseline information on the household and individual characteristic of Pacific Island elders living in the United States. As so little is known about the characteristics of this micro-minority population, this paper begins with a series of basic indicators highlighting the heterogeneity among the Pacific Islander population. In a direct application of the census data as a research tool we test a series of multivariate models on likelihood of living in a complex household, being the head of a NHPI household and the risks of disability controlling for Pacific Island ethnicities.