This is the final report on "Asian Americans in a Mixed Neighborhood: A Longitudinal Study in St. Louis, MO," research conducted by the International Institute of Metropolitan St. Louis with the U.S. Bureau of the Census. In 1988, the Census Bureau conducted a Dress Rehearsal Census of the City of St. Louis. Under a Joint Statistical Agreement with the Center for Survey Methods Research of the Census Bureau, the principal investigators, Rynearson and Gosebrink, used ethnographic methods to conduct an Alternative Enumeration (AE) of Asian Americans and other residents of a mixed neighborhood at that time. The present study is a replication of the AE of the same blocks conducted after the 1988 Dress Rehearsal Census. Although results may be generalizable to other groups, our primary ethnographic focus is on Lowland Lao refugees.

Our goals are to relate specific cases and rates of census undercounts and coverage issues in a sample area to sociocultural causes of census error. One of our specific hypotheses was that a longitudinal analysis will demonstrate that coverage of the Lao and other Asian immigrants in St. Louis sample area would be positively affected by their experience in the 1988 Dress Rehearsal Census and by community assistance that the Asian immigrants received. On the other hand, we also hypothesized that census follow-up enumeration of the Lao and other Asians would produce undercounts due to language communication barriers and other census procedures