Introduction to the special issue on the secondary analysis of the National Latino Asian American Study (NLAAS) dataset.

Abstract

It is my pleasure to introduce the first special issue for the Asian American Journal of Psychology. We instituted the Annual Review of Asian American Psychology, which is published in the December issue of every year, to provide a critical review of the literature pertaining to Asian American psychology in the previous year. Two such reviews have been published (December 2010 and December 2011). It is a logical next step to begin publishing special issues that cover a thematic topic in the field within the journal. This inaugural special issue will cover studies consisting of secondary analysis of the National Latino Asian American Study (NLAAS) Dataset (2012). It is an “internal” special issue edited by me. Additional special issues are in preparation and these will be “external” special issues guest edited by others and covering a range of topic including health disparities, parenting, leadership, and prevention. Individuals interested in proposing a special issue are encouraged to contact me directly. For many decades, there was a dearth of community-based epidemiological studies of mental health problems among Asian Americans. Over three decades ago, Sue and Morishima (1982) lamented the lack of epidemiological data on Asian American mental health and pointed out the disadvantages of “treated-prevalence rates” of disorders that we were limited to at that time. The field was restricted to clinical case studies and treated prevalence studies (i.e., clinic and hospital visit data) to gauge the nature and extent of mental health problems within the Asian American communities. From 1980 –1985, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) funded the Epidemiological Catchment Area (ECA) program, which oversampled African Americans in this multisite study (Robbins and Regier, 1991). However, it was not until 2002 when the NIMH funded the National Latino Asian American Study, which was a pioneering step in correcting that situation. The National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS) is “a nationally representative community household survey that estimates the prevalence of mental disorders and rates of mental health service utilization by Latinos and Asian Americans in the United States” with data been collected between May 2002 and November 2003. The NLAAS dataset (2012) also contains variables that allow for the comparison of “social position, environmental context, and psychosocial factors with the prevalence of psychiatric disorders and utilization rates of mental health services” (http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ icpsrweb/CPES/index.jsp). A call for papers for a special issue of the Asian American Journal of Psychology that will be devoted to empirical studies based on the NLAAS dataset was issued in June 2010. The purpose of this special issue is to highlight and showcase the empirical research that has been generated by the release of the NLAAS for secondary analysis and to promote more research using that dataset. This special issue includes empirical articles that are based on analysis of the Asian American data within the NLAAS dataset. Studies using comparative data from other datasets within the Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (CPES) with those from the NLAAS dataset were also permitted. We received numerous submissions that underwent the usual peer review process, and 9 articles were finally accepted. Because we normally publish only 5–7 articles per issue in the journal, we decided to divide this special issue into two parts. Part 1 is published in this issue (March 2012) and will focus mainly on psychopathology and mental health studies from the NLAAS. Part 2 will include studies of education, discrimination, adjustment, and distress and will appear in the June 2012 issue. We Asian American Journal of Psychology © 2012 American Psychological Association 2012, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1–2 1948-1985/12/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0027685