Current Sponsored Research Projects

MAHVA: Migration and Health among Vietnamese Americans

Effective dates: 2003-2011
Funding Source: NIH (National Institutes for Child and Human Development)
Tulane's Role: Primary recipient
Region or Country (ies): Vietnam and the US
Principal Investigator(s): Mark VanLandingham, PhD

 The study examines a wide range of standard health outcomes among Vietnamese living both in the United States and in Vietnam. A major substantive focus is the investigation of overall health status and core health beliefs among working-age Vietnamese adults who have recently immigrated to the United States. While there is an extensive literature on the health of other major immigrant groups, we know much less about the health of Vietnamese Americans, who constitute one of the largest waves of immigration to the United States in recent history.

A major methodological focus involves the development of new techniques to better explain health differences between migrants and non-migrants. Attributing reported effects of migration on health to specific causes are complicated by the inherent difficulties of separating the effects of migration per se from selection factors. Our approach to separating migration effects from selection effects involves a comparison involving three distinct groups: Vietnamese immigrants in the United States; Vietnamese who have never left Vietnam; and Vietnamese returnees in Vietnam. Before June 1989 essentially all who made it to a country of first asylum were successfully settled in the West (most in the United States) – this constitutes the Vietnamese immigrant group. For those arriving in the transition countries after June 1989, only those able to prove a bona fide risk of persecution in Vietnam were accepted for resettlement – those repatriated constitute the returnee group. Those who never attempted to emigrate constitute the never-migrant group. Comparing the never-migrants (in Vietnam) with the returnees on the dependent variables of interest, we estimate the effects of selection (the unobserved characteristics that place one at risk of migration) on health outcomes net of migration effects. By comparing the returnees to the immigrants, we estimate the effects of migration per se on health outcomes net of selection effects.