NOTES
- I am grateful to Dr. Eldon Wegner for use of his data on University of Hawaii students. I also thank Dr. Herbert Barringer for sharing 1980 Census data on Hawaii. I appreciate Dr. Kiyoshi Ikeda and Dr. Patricia Steinhoff for help in writing this paper, and Dr. Michael Hennessy for his instruction on data analysis. I also thank Dr. William Liu, director of the Pacific/Asian American Mental Health Research Center, for the use of its working version of an Asian American file derived from the Census Bureau's 5 percent Public Use Sample (PUMS “A” Tape). Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the comments of the editors of Amerasia Journal and an anonymous reviewer.
- William Caudill and George DeVos, “Achievement, Culture, and Personality: The Case of Japanese-Americans,” The American Anthroplogist 58 (December 1956), 1102–1126; Harry Kitano, Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture (Englewood Cliffs, 1976); Gene N. Levine and Darrel M. Montero, “Socioeconomic Mobility among Three Generations of Japanese Americans,” Journal of Social Issues 29 (1973); and William Petersen, Japanese Americans: Oppression and Success (New York, 1971).
- Bob H. Suzuki, “Education and the Socialization of Asian Americans: A Revisionist Analysis of the ‘Model Minority Thesis’,” Amerasia Journal 4 (1977), 23–51; Morrison G. Wong, “The Cost of Being Chinese, Japanese, Filipino in the United States, 1960, 1970, 1976,” Pacific Sociological Review 25 (January 1982), 59–79; Eric Woodrum, “An Assessment of Japanese American Assimilation, Pluralism, and Subordination,” American Journal of Sociology 87 (July 1981), 157–169; and Robert M. Jiobu, “Earning Differentials between Whites and Ethnic Minorities: The Cases of Asian Americans, Blacks, and Chicanos,” Sociology and Social Research 61 (October 1976), 25–38.
- See Andrew W. Lind, Hawaii's People (Honolulu, 1980), 24–31, for a discussion on the effects of Hawaii's multi-ethnic society on the labor market.
- This age group sample was from the 1980 Census of Hawaii which contains data on all persons aged twenty-five to sixty-four in samples of Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics drawn from the U.S. 1980 PUMS 0.1 percent and 0.1 percent B samples and all Asian and Pacific Americans drawn from the 5 percent A sample. The data contains 109,021 persons.
- In the analysis of this age group inclusive of all educational backgrounds, the highest income was earned by Japanese American men, $18,257, followed by Caucasian men, $17,627. The annual incomes of other Asian men were: Chinese, $15,658; Filipino, $14,271; Hawaiian, $15,474; Korean, $14,538. The income difference of Caucasian and Japanese American men between those with “all educational backgrounds” and those with “some college education and above” is due partly to wealthy Caucasian parents sending their sons to mainland universities. Caucasians who went to the mainland for their education and returned to Hawaii for employment would increase the average income for Caucasians in the category of “with some college education and above,” whereas there is virtually no difference among the two groups for Japanese Americans. The findings from the 1980 Census are supported by analysis of 1975 Census data, although the income of Caucasian men, $16,787, was $1,445 more than that of Chinese American men and $1,909 more than Japanese Americans, even among the same cohort, “with some college education and above.”
- This paper is concerned with differences in income attainment among various racial/ethnic groups. However, there are also differences between the dominant group and minority groups in educational and occupational attainment in Hawaii. Regarding the status of one ethnic minority group—Filipino men—Edwin T. Fujii and James Mak, “On the Relative Economic Progress of U.S.-born Filipino Men,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 33 (April 1985), 557–573, report relatively lower annual incomes of Filipino men resulting mainly from occupational segregation and not necessarily wage discrimination. They also argue that the relative disadvantage of Filipino men was related to “the handicap of their late arrival in Hawaii.”
- For a review of human capital theory, see Mark Blaug, “The Empirical Status of Human Capital Theory: A Slightly Jaundiced Survey,” Journal of Economic Literature 14 (September 1976), 827–855. In status-attainment models (the Blau-Duncan model specifically), the sequence of status transmissions on the basis of objective variables predicts attainment levels. For a discussion of the model, see Peter M. Blau and Otis Dudley Duncan, The American Occupational Structure (New York, 1967). In the Wisconsin model, objective factors are complemented by addition of subjective, social-psychological influences as causal inputs in the process. For a discussion, see William H. Sewell, Archibald O. Haller, and Alejandro Portes, “The Educational and Early Occupational Attainment Process,” American Sociological Review 34 (February 1969), 82–92.
- For a discussion of labor market theory, see Paul D. Montagna, Occupation and Society: Toward a Sociology for the Labor Market (New York, 1977). The radical economic and the dual labor market approaches argue that there is a fundamental division in the labor market, the primary sector and the secondary sector. A radical economic theorist emphasizes the dominance of the productive, sectoral division over the labor market division as an explanatory factor in income differentials. See, for example, Randy Hodson, “Labor in the Monopoly, Competitive and State Sectors Production,” Politics and Society 8: 3–4 (1978), 429–480.
- Harry Kitano and Stanley Sue, “The Model Minorities,” “Journal of Social Issues 29(1973), 1–9.
- Morrison G. Wong and Charles Hirschman, “Labor Force Participation and Socioeconomic Attainment of Asian Women,” Sociological Perspective 26 (October 1983), 423–446.
- Each parent's educational attainment was determined by assigning a number from three through twenty to eight categories: 3 = some grade school or less, 6 = grade school, 9 = some high school, 12 = high school, 14 = some college, 16 = college, 18 = some graduate school, and 20 = graduate school. Father's socioeconomic status was measured by assigning Duncan's Socioeconomic Index (SEI) to the occupation that the respondents mentioned as their father's occupation in the 1969 survey. Annual family income was measured by the mid-point of the original annual family income categories in the 1969 survey. The mid-point incomes were used as if they were interval measurement data.
- We tested for robustness by running a regression analysis with standard human capital variables without socioeconomic background variables. F test showed that the results of the regression analysis of human capital variables were robust both in the pooled sample of the three ethnic groups and that of the Caucasians and Japanese Americans only. The results of F test were statistically significant at the.01 with R2 of.101 and.118 respectively. F test was also conducted to see if the addition of the variables of socioeconomic background was important. The test indicated that the addition of these variables to the human capital variables made a statistically significant difference in improving R2 in both the pooled samples.
- We ran tests of homogeneity to determine if the addition of the interaction term of ethnicity to equation 2 in table 5 made any important differences. The F test indicated that the addition was not statistically significant at the.05 level. Thus, the results in table 5 would not be different with the inclusion of the interaction term of ethnicity. Eighteen pairs of tests of coefficients were run to see if any coefficient of variables in the equation with ethnic interaction would be different from that of the equation in table 5. The tests indicated that with the exception of the variable of father's education, the coefficients of the other variables in the equation with the addition of the ethnic interaction term were not significantly different from those in table 5.