Building Social Science Data Infrastructure: The 2016 National Asian American Survey

University Of California-Riverside, Riverside CA

Investigators

Abstract

SES-1558986 Karthick Ramakrishnan University of California-Riverside Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the United States, and there are important gaps in our understanding of their social and civic integration. In addition, Asian Americans exhibit significant socioeconomic diversity, making them ideal for answering larger theoretical questions on immigrant incorporation in the United States, as it is shaped by differences in national origin, residential concentration, and educational and labor market outcomes. This project will build a data resource for public release in June 2017 that will have widespread utility among scholars in social science disciplines, most notably in sociology, political science, and public policy, as well for journalists and bloggers versed in social science data and trends. The survey of Asian Americans will provide important data for questions related to immigrant incorporation, attitudes on economic inequality and race-relations, and civic and political engagement. In addition to providing comparisons within the Asian American racial category, we will include cross-racial comparisons (to African Americans, Hispanics/Latinos, and non-Hispanic whites) using the same instrument and mode of interview. This project advances the mission of the National Science Foundation to promote the progress of science, particularly the social sciences, as well as to advance national health, prosperity, and welfare. In particular, this project has relevance in terms of broader impacts as specified by Congress in 2010: Asian Americans have a disproportionately large number of high-skilled workers in STEM fields. Understanding their experiences, attitudes, opportunities, and barriers, will be critical to ensuring the economic competitiveness of the United States and the development of a globally competitive STEM workforce This survey of Asian Americans will: 1) be contemporaneous with the 2016 General Social Survey (GSS) and American National Election Study (ANES), 2) replicate key questions from those surveys, and 3) build on the pioneering efforts of past surveys of Asian Americans. The project produces a dataset for public release in June 2017 through ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) that will have widespread utility among scholars in social science disciplines as well for journalists and bloggers versed in social science data and trends. The survey will provide data to address questions related to immigrant incorporation, attitudes on economic inequality and race-relations, and civic and political engagement. In addition to providing comparisons within the Asian American racial category (samples of approximately 400 adults each among major national origin groups), it will include cross-racial comparisons using the same instrument and mode of interview (approximately 400 adults each among whites, Latinos, and African Americans). A growing number of studies focus on Asian Americans. However, existing surveys tend to be limited to a small number of national origin groups or to a relatively specific geographic area. More general studies such as the GSS and ANES do not have the requisite sample size or language support to accurately capture the experiences and attitudes of Asian Americans. The primary innovation of the 2016 National Asian American Survey is to replicate questions on important general surveys, specifically the GSS and the ANES, with a large sample of Asian Americans in a well-designed study. With this commitment to question replication, the 2016 National Asian American Survey will allow researchers, for the first time, to compare Asian Americans to the U.S. public on key social and political measures, and to make important comparisons within the racial group.