Portrait of a Community: The Indian American Family Study is Looking for Interviewees

This Fall I launched the Indian American Family Study, which investigates Indian Americans’ views and experiences of family life. As a family demographer, I have spent my career studying family life in India and Nepal and am now turning to the Indian diaspora. At 5 million people, the population of Indian Americans is sizable and growing rapidly. Indian Americans also play a prominent role in social, economic, and political life in the U.S., India, and the Indian diaspora. In turn, understanding Indian American family life is an increasingly vital component of understanding family life in the United States and beyond.

The study currently features interviews with first- and second-generation Indian Americans. Our team, which includes 14 graduate students at Indiana University, has completed over 60 interviews so far. First-generation interviewees include anyone born in India and currently living in the United States. These include Indian students studying at American universities or Indians living in the U.S. for work; interviewees do not have to be American citizens or green card holders. The second generation is limited to those born in the United States whose mother and father were both born in India. We include both generations, as well as a range of ages, so we can capture the range of views and experiences among Indian Americans.

The interviews will provide a rich, detailed view of Indian Americans’ views and experiences of marriage, childbearing, intergenerational relationships, and family life more broadly. This in-depth description gathered from the interviews will be paired with an investigation of patterns and trends in family life in the Indian American population as a whole. This population component draws on data from the American Community Survey, the only nationally representative survey with a sufficiently large sample of Indian Americans. Using this survey data, we will examine, for instance, how the timing and experiences of marriage, divorce, and fertility have changed over time among Indian Americans in recent decades. We will also compare the family life of Indian Americans to other South Asian Americans, Chinese Americans, the broad category of Asian Americans, and white Americans.

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This May and June our team is hoping to conduct over 100 more interviews. If you are willing to share your experiences and views of family life, please get in touch. The interviews are done online with Zoom so participants can live anywhere in the United States. You can call or email our team at iafs@indiana.edu or (812) 855-6661. You can also contact us by completing the online form on our website at iafs.indiana.edu.

Keera Allendorf is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Indiana University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan. Dr. Allendorf’s research focuses on family, gender, and health. She investigates how and why family behaviors vary and change over time and how family behaviors shape well-being. Geographically, her work focuses on India and Nepal, but also includes comparative work on Asia more broadly and the United States.