DOI: 10.3886/icpsr04637.v1
title: Survey of Holt Adoptees and Their Families, 2005
title: Version 1

description: This study, conducted January 2004 to June 2006, was
 undertaken to assess the health status, educational attainment, and
 income of adult Korean-American adoptees and their adoptive families.
 The study focused on families who adopted a Korean-American child
 through Holt International Children's Services from 1970 to 1980. The
 principal investigator hoped to identify the effects of large-scale
 changes in family environment on children's outcomes using data on
 adults who were adopted in infancy. Korean-American adoptees placed
 through Holt International Children's Services had been quasi-randomly
 assigned to these families in infancy using a queuing (first-come,
 first-served) policy. One adoptive parent from each family was
 surveyed, as well as a small subset of adult adoptees, and each case
 represented an adopted or non-adopted child in the family. Adoptive
 parents were asked to give their age, sex, marital status, occupation,
 education level, household income, height, weight, tobacco and alcohol
 usage, and the number of children they had. Adoptive parents also
 gave information on their adopted and non-adopted children's age, sex,
 marital status, education level, income, weight, height, undergraduate
 institution, number of children, and whether their children smoked,
 drank alcohol, or had asthma. For adopted children, parents gave the
 arrival age of the child and whether the child was adopted through
 Holt International. Adoptive parents also indicated whether they were
 aware of and had used services such as workshops and referral services
 offered by Holt. Since the survey relied on parent reports of their
 adult children's outcomes, surveys were also sent to a small subset of
 adoptees. Their surveys included the same questions asked of their
 adoptive parents, as well as the adoptee's value of assets, religion,
 and frequency of religious attendance. The study also contained
 information on adoptees' birth parents obtained from Holt
 International's administrative records and constructed variables that
 analyzed household composition, population characteristics, and the
education and health status of the adoptive family.
description: Response Rates: There was an overall response rate of 27 percent.
description: A mail-in survey was sent to a random sample of families
 who had adopted a child through Holt International's Korea program
from 1970 to 1980.
description: Datasets: 
DS1: Survey of Holt Adoptees and Their Families, 2005
description: The adoptive families of Korean-American children who were
 placed as infants by Holt International Children's Services from 1970
to 1980.
description: mail questionnaire(1) The original data file was received by ICPSR in
 Stata format and was converted to SPSS format using the GET STATA
 command. For this reason, variable names were shortened to a length of
 eight characters. (2) Value labels for unknown codes were added in
 several variables. (3) To protect respondent confidentiality, employer
 names were removed from values in the variable OCCCURRE. (4) Values
 relating to the birth years of child respondents in variable YEARBIRT
 were transferred to variable CHILDBYE, per instructions from the
 principal investigator. (5) Variables GENDER through IND_TR_H contain
 survey responses from child respondents. (6) The formats of several
 variables were adjusted to fit the width of the values present in
 them. (7) Variables MOTHERSY, BIRTHM_A, and BIRTHM_B were converted
 from character to numeric. (8) According to the principal
 investigator, the variable WEIGHTER was the inverse of the estimated
 probability of response from a probit of response on parental
 characteristics. (9) Because of the anonymity of the mail-in surveys,
 31 of the child respondents were unable to be linked with their
 original families. For this reason, 31 records were missing data on
 the child's adoptive parents and likely contain duplicate information
 about that child in another record. (10) According to the principal
 investigator, the asterisks found in the variable labels of
 constructed variables denote multiplication. (11) The CASEID variable
was created for use with online analysis.