  Many population surveys do not provide information on respondents'
residential addresses, instead offering coarse geographies like zip code or
higher aggregations. However, fine resolution geography can be beneficial for
characterizing neighborhoods, especially for relatively rare populations such
as immigrants. One way to obtain such information is to link survey records to
records in auxiliary databases that include residential addresses by matching
on variables common to both files. In this research note, we present an
approach based on probabilistic record linkage that enables matching survey
participants in the Chinese Immigrants in Raleigh-Durham (ChIRDU) Study to
records from InfoUSA, an information provider of residential records. The two
files use different Chinese name romanization practices, which we address
through a novel and generalizable strategy for constructing records' pairwise
comparison vectors for romanized names. Using a fully Bayesian record linkage
model, we characterize the geospatial distribution of Chinese immigrants in the
Raleigh-Durham area.
