Arthur Sakamoto

Arthur Sakamoto is Professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. His research focuses on social inequality as well as racial and ethnic relations.

Updated January 2011

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The Japanese American Family - Part 8 of 8

>> Part 7SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONResearchers have become so fixated on the drama of the World War II internment that the general study of contemporary Japanese Americans themselves has been unfortunately neglected in recent years. We have sought to help fill this research gap by investigating the JA family using recent demographic data. Our results indicate major changes since the time of the first half of the 20th century that figured prominently in the descriptions of the classical Issei family and the Nisei family as provided by Kitano (1976). Indeed, the changes that have occurred sin…

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The Japanese American Family - Part 7 of 8

>> Part 6CHARACTERISTICS OF CONTEMPORARY WHITE AND JAPANESE AMERICAN HOUSEHOLDSTable 4 displays some descriptive characteristics for White households in terms of basic demographic indicators, while Table 5 shows these characteristics for JA households. The indicators include the proportion residing in the Pacific region (i.e., Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, and California), the mean age of the householder, the mean number of children in the household, the mean household size (i.e., including children and adults), the proportion of householders with a bachelor’s degree, the of…

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The Japanese American Family - Part 6 of 8

>> Part 5Studying Contemporary Japanese American Families (Cont'd)The next six categories refer to marital families in which the couple consists of a particular match between the two spouses based on the four JA types. The FB-FB-Japanese family includes a married couple where both spouses are foreign-born. The NB-NB-Japanese family includes a married couple where both spouses are native-born. The BR-J-White family includes a married couple consisting of spouses who are: BR-Japanese and BR-Japanese; or BR-Japanese and J-White; or J-White and J-White. The FB-NB-Japanese family includes a …

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The Japanese American Family - Part 5 of 8

>> Part 4STUDYING CONTEMPORARY JAPANESE AMERICAN FAMILIESIn order to investigate contemporary patterns of the JA family, we use data from the American Community Survey (ACS), which is administered by the U.S. Census Bureau and is representative of the entire household population of the U.S. Our analysis pools together the surveys from 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 so that an adequate sample size of a comparatively small demographic group (i.e., Japanese Americans) may be obtained. Our results thus refer to period from 2005 to 2008. Table 1 describes the categorization of racial/ethnic g…

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The Japanese American Family - Part 4 of 8

>> Part 3CHANGE AND ADAPTATIONAny analysis of modern families will invariably need to incorporate the realities of several rising trends that have influenced the living arrangements of a broad spectrum of Americans in the 21st century. First, there is an increased incidence of non-family households. Demographers traditionally define the family as two or more persons living together in a household unit who are related by blood, marriage or adoption, but in the U.S. today many households do not fit this description. For example, one-person households are more common now as many middle-age…

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