Using web demographics to model population change of Vietnamese-Americans in Texas between 2000 and 2009

With respect to the great wealth of information available online, the Internet can be viewed as a gigantic database with diverse resources. One of the pressing issues is to investigate the effectiveness and usefulness of the available information over the Internet. This research modeled the population change of Vietnamese-Americans (VA) in Texas from 2000 to 2009 by obtaining web demographic data from the Internet. The project objective is to pilot study a novel approach to conducting online "census" by using Web 2. 0 technologies and to investigate the effectiveness of web data for GIS-based demographic application. The solicited VA demographics were geocoded at both county and census tract levels and compared with the Census 2000 demographics in the Geographic Information Systems. Spatial and statistical analyses were used to explore the spatial distribution of VA and to model their population change between 2000 and 2009. The findings of this study include: (1) in general, there are significant differences in the spatial distribution of the VA population between the web demographics and Census 2000 at both county and census tract levels, (2) the Hoover Indices of VA population in Texas at 2000 and 2009 revealed a trend of deconcentration which conforms to the general rural-urban-suburban migration among major metropolitan areas in Texas. This study sheds new insights to using web demographic data for population predictions and applications to plan services for ethnic groups.