Studying Chinese immigrants’ spatial distribution in the Raleigh–Durham area by linking survey and commercial data using romanized names
研究通过概率记录链接方法，将中国移民调查数据与商业数据库匹配，利用罗马化姓名策略，分析北卡罗来纳州罗利-达勒姆地区中国移民的精细空间分布。
Many population surveys do not provide information on respondents' residential addresses, instead offering coarse geographies like zip code or higher aggregations. However, fine resolution geography can be beneficial for characterizing neighbourhoods, especially for relatively rare populations such as immigrants. One way to obtain such information is to link survey records to records in auxiliary databases that include residential addresses by matching on variables common to both files. We present an approach based on probabilistic record linkage that enables matching survey participants in the Chinese Immigrants in Raleigh-Durham Study to records from InfoUSA, an information provider of residential records. The two files use different Chinese name romanization practices, which we address through a novel and generalizable strategy for constructing records' pairwise comparison vectors for romanized names. Using a fully Bayesian record linkage model, we characterize the geospatial distribution of Chinese immigrants in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina.