Disability Among Internationally Adopted Children in the United States.

Despite many studies of children adopted within the United States, there is no nationally representative research on health status for those adopted internationally. We use restricted-access data from the complete long form of Census 2000 to estimate disability rates for internationally adopted children ages 5 to 15 in 2000. Results show that internationally adopted children have disability rates similar to those adopted domestically (11.7 percent versus 12.2 percent respectively), and more than twice the rate for all children in that age range (5.8 percent). Our analysis shows that, in the presence of simple controls for gender, age at adoption, current age, and parental characteristics, the odds of disability relative to domestic adoptees range from one-half or less (Japan, China, Korea) to twice as large (Romania, Bulgaria, Haiti). We also show models including only internationally adopted children. This permits us to test the effects of gender, age at immigration/adoption, current age, and parental characteristics on disability rates specifically for internationally adopted children, by country of origin.The authors contributed equally to this research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]