Health and Well-being of Koreans

The Health and Well-Being of Koreans (HAWK) was a cross-sectional survey of adults ages 18 and older in the United States who are of Korean descent supported by the National Institute on Aging. The goal of HAWK was to implement Web-based respondent driven sampling (Web-RDS) is an extension of RDS, which exploits existing social networks for recruiting research participants, specifically, of small and hard-to-sample groups. In the case of HAWK, the target participants were of granular racial/ethnic minority groups. A total of 772 participated between May 2022 and January 2023. The participants were asked about COVID-19, physical as well as mental health, life satisfaction, health behaviors, healthcare coverage and utilization as well as social relations and networks along with socio-demographic characteristics. The questions mostly come from established surveys, such as the American Community Survey and the California Health Interview Survey. The questionnaires were provided in English and Korean, and participants self-selected the language that they preferred to complete the survey in. The data is expected to provide a broad overview of Korean Americans through the last stage of the Covid-19 pandemic. To protect respondent privacy and data confidentiality, peer recruitment information as well as sensitive information (e.g., citizenship), such variables were excluded from the current file and will be included in a dataset available through ICPSR in a restricted format.   Because HAWK uses RDS, which does not follow the conventions of probability sampling, users are advised to exercise caution in making population-level inference with results from the analysis of HAWK data.