HMONG POPULATION RESEARCH PROJECT

THE DATA

Results obtained so far by the Hmong Population Research Project are based on detailed data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Summary Tape File 4B (STF 4B) from the 1990 Census of Population and Housing. This provides information on dozens of demographic and economic variables, most of them presented in the form of cross-tabulated tables.

For example, one of the larger tables in STF 4B (namely PB96) provides cross-tabulations of Family Type (three categories: married-couple family; male householder, no wife present; or female householder, no husband present), Age of Householder (in eight age ranges), and Family Income in 1989 (in nine income ranges). The table provides counts for each of the 216 (3 x 8 x 9) resulting cells.

STF 4B is an essential source for this project, since it includes a detailed breakdown by race. Other Census sources include a broad Asian or Pacific Islander category, but STF 4B breaks this broader category down into thirty-one subcategories, one of which is the Hmong.

The data in STF 4B are based on a sample of the 1990 Census. About one-sixth of the respondents were asked to complete the “long form,” which included detailed questions about income, occupation, housing, education, language, country of origin, race, and other variables. Since the resulting data represent only a sample of the entire population, results might not accurately reflect the true, underlying population characteristics. (Therefore small differences between counties or states in the results presented here might not be statistically significant.) Statistical methods can be used to accurately calculate standard errors, construct confidence intervals, and perform hypothesis tests based on the STF 4B data.

The STF 4B files from the 1990 census are huge, so the Census Bureau makes them available only on tape. We obtained our data with the generous assistance of Dan Veroff, a Demographic Specialist working at the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, who extracted the STF 4B data on the Hmong from Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the eleven California counties with the largest Hmong populations. Without his expert help and patient explanations, this project would not have been possible.

Population Distribution | Average Year of Entry | Educational Attainment | Income Distribution
Housing Variables | Employment Status | Linguistic Isolation | Occupational Distribution
The Data

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Maintained by: Dr. Wayne Carroll, Tua Lor, Elina Camane
Contact: The Economics Hmong Research Team
Last Updated: November 2000