The Role of Immigration Status in Heavy Drinking Among Asian Americans

Abstract

We examined the role of Asian Americans’ immigration status in their heavy drinking, using a national sample of 3,574 Asian American adults during 2008 to 2011 when surveyed by the National Health Interview Survey. Our results, with relevant social structural factors controlled, show that U.S.-born Asian Americans exhibited the highest heavy-drinking levels, followed by long-time-resident Asian immigrants, then recent-resident Asian immigrants (our three main subsamples). The higher heavy-drinking levels characterizing U.S.-born Asians who were male and younger, as compared to immigrant Asians who were male and younger, helped explain differential heavy-drinking levels across subsamples. The study's limitations are noted.

Keywords :

• Heavy drinking
• immigration status
• U.S.-born Asians
• long-time-resident Asian immigrants
• recent-resident Asian immigrants

THE AUTHORS

Celia C. Lo, Ph.D., is a Professor in the School of Social Work, University of Alabama. Her research interests include the sociology of drugs and alcohol, disparities in health-risk behaviors and health, and juvenile delinquency.

Tyrone C. Cheng, Ph.D., L.C.S.W., P.I.P., is an Associate Professor in the University of Alabama School of Social Work, . His research interests include welfare reforms, Medicaid policies, and child welfare and drug use.

Rebecca J. Howell, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Charleston Southern University. Her research interests include the etiology of delinquency and drug use, program evaluation, and criminological theory testing.

Notes

1 The journal's style utilizes the category substance abuse as a diagnostic category. Substances are used or misused; living organisms are and can be abused. Editor's note.

2 The reader is reminded that the concepts of “risk factors”, as well as “protective factors”, are often noted in the literature, without adequately noting their dimensions (linear, nonlinear; rates of development; anchoring or integration, cessation, etc.), their “demands,” the critical necessary conditions (endogenously as well as exogenously; from a micro to a meso to a macro level) which are necessary for either of them to operate (begin, continue, become anchored and integrate, change as de facto realities change, cease, etc.) or not to and whether their underpinnings are theory-driven, empirically-based, individual, and/or systemic stake holder-bound, based upon “principles of faith, doctrinaire positions,” “personal truths,” historical observation, precedents and traditions that accumulate over time, conventional wisdom, perceptual, and judgmental constraints, “transient public opinion” or what. This is necessary to consider and to clarify if these term are not to remain as yet additional shibboleth in a field of many stereotypes, tradition-driven activities, “principles of faith” and stakeholder objectives. Editor's note.

3 The reader is referred to Hills's criteria for causation which were developed in order to help assist researchers and clinicians determine if risk factors were causes of a particular disease or outcomes or merely associated. [Hill, A. B. (1965). The environment and disease: associations or causation? Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 58: 295–300.]. Editor's note.