Rice University Research Repository
The Rice Research Repository (R-3) provides access to research produced at Rice University, including theses and dissertations, journal articles, research center publications, datasets, and academic journals. Managed by Fondren Library, R-3 is indexed by Google and Google Scholar, follows best practices for preservation, and provides DOIs to facilitate citation. Woodson Research Center collections, including Rice Images and Documents and the Task Force on Slavery, Segregation, and Racial Injustice, have moved here.
Communities
Recent Submissions
Asian American Community Study: Individual and Household Characteristics in the Greater Houston Area
(Rice University Kinder Institute for Urban Research, 2025) Bao, Katharine Y.; Potter, Dan; Simburger, Dylan
Greater Houston is home to one of the most diverse and fastest-growing Asian populations in the country, but this was not always the case. In 1980, Asian residents made up just 1.8% of the area population. By 2023, that number had nearly quintupled to 8.7%. Fort Bend County, for instance, was home to more Asian residents in 2023 than the entire state of Texas had in 1980. Fueled by both immigration and domestic migration from other parts of the U.S., the Houston area’s Asian communities are among its most diverse populations in every sense—ethnically, linguistically, culturally, and geographically. Given the growth and diversification of Asian populations in the Houston region, this brief provides a demographic overview. It disaggregates the many different ethnicities that often are categorized under the general label of “Asian” to better explore and understand the ethnic composition, nativity and generational status, education, and income of these groups in the area.
Asian American Community Study: Forms and Spaces of Anti-Asian Discrimination in the Houston Area
(Rice University Kinder Institute for Urban Research, 2025) Niznik, Aaron
The Asian population in the United States has expanded rapidly over the past few decades, more than doubling between 2000 and 2023 to comprise approximately 7% of the total population. Texas is home to one of the largest populations of Asian residents in the country. Within the state, the Houston area has one of the fastest-growing and most ethnically diverse Asian populations nationwide. As such, it is a valuable setting for examining the distinctive experiences and perspectives of Asian residents. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian discrimination has been widely documented across the United States. In the Houston area, roughly 4 in 10 Asian residents reported experiencing some form of discrimination in the past year. Experiences with discrimination are linked to adverse mental health outcomes, including depression, anxiety, and substance use, highlighting the need to better understand the mechanisms and contexts of anti-Asian discrimination. This research brief examines the lived experiences of Asian residents facing anti-Asian discrimination within the highly diverse context of the Houston area. Although the link between anti-Asian discrimination and negative mental health outcomes is well established, less is known about how such discrimination is experienced and the specific contexts in which it occurs. Investigating these lived experiences illuminates the sources and mechanisms of discrimination, offering opportunities for increasing public understanding and encouraging bias-awareness learning that may help prevent future incidents.
Greater Houston Community Panel 2023 and 2024 User Guide
(Rice University Kinder Institute for Urban Research, 2025) Houston Population Research Center
The Greater Houston Community Panel (GHCP) is a longitudinal, cohort study of adults living in the Houston area who respond to multiple surveys each year. The study is housed in the Houston Population Research Center (HPRC) at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University and is conducted in partnership with the Institute for Health Policy at the UTHealth Houston School of Public Health. This user guide is meant to provide an overview of the project and its data, as well as instructions for working with the public-use files that are periodically released. The sections throughout the rest of the document are organized to give an overview of the survey contents, data collection practices, responses and response rates, sampling procedures, and best practices for data analysis. GHCP survey data can be used to analyze trends on the values, tastes, preferences, experiences, and circumstances of Houston-area residents, providing unparalleled insights into one of the largest and most diverse areas in the nation.
The Presence and Portrayal of Climate Change and Other Environmental Problems in Popular Films: A Quantitative Content Analysis
(Taylor & Francis, 2025) Schneider-Mayerson, Matthew; Lim, Jerald; Stringer, Moya; Wilson, Adria; Zhou, Zoky; Bellido, Dominic; English and Creative Writing
How have popular films responded to – or avoided – the climate and nature crises? To begin to answer this question systematically, quantitative content analysis was applied to 250 of the most-rated fictional films on IMDb that were released between 2013 and 2022. We found that climate change existed in 12.8% of these films, while a global environmental problem (climate change, freshwater pollution, marine pollution, air pollution, deforestation, species extinction and biodiversity decline, or toxic waste) existed in 26%; the presence of climate change, as well as common climate impacts, increased substantially over time; when climate change and other environmental problems were present, they were generally mentioned in just one or two scenes, and their gravity and/or urgency was not emphasized. As the first systematic, large-scale analysis of the presence and portrayal of climate change and other environmental problems in fictional narratives in the academic literature, this article illustrates a potentially productive area of future research, which is discussed.
R3: Rice Research Review Winter 2025
(Rice University, 2025)