Structural and assimilationist explanations of Asian American intermarriage

This study represents our efforts to synthesize two intermarriage perspectives-one explaining intermarriage at the micro level using individual attributes, the other explaining it at the macro level using aggregated community characteristics. The 5% Public Use Microdata Samples from the 1980 U.S. Census were used to link individual and community data. The empirical assessment of the linked model showed great promise, indicating that the explanatory power of our model was significantly improved when one set of factors was supplemented by the other. Our findings support the cultural assimilation hypothesis but contradicted the structural assimilation arguments. Contextual factors such as group size and sex ratio also exerted strong structural constraints on marital choices. This study is one of the first to provide information about the determinants of intermarriage for six different Asian subgroups residing in the continental U.S.