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Money Could Give Asian Americans a Voice on Important Issues

voteTen year ago this August, a study commissioned by the Asian American Journalists Association and the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno focused on the lack of national polling breaking out the opinions of Asian Americans.

Ten years later, a review by AsAmNews finds the opinions of the fastest growing ethnic group in the country, Asian Americans, continue to be an afterthought and hopes for the future are grim at best.

The 2003 study authored by Dr. Jennifer Greer found only 18 polls from 1990 to 2003 which both asked a question specific to Asian Americans and also broke out the responses from Asian Americans.

Although exact numbers are not available, anecdotal evidence through a Google search and general observation indicate that in 2013 there are still very few polls which break out the opinions of Asian Americans.

Just this past March, The Pew Research Center’s study on social media use came under criticism for not breaking out the data it received from Asian Americans, a group that researchers have found have an extremely high rate of social media use.

Pew explained its reasons in a blog on its own web site. It said:

–The population of Asian American is just a small slice of the overall population

–The diversity of the Asian American population and the languages they speak makes offering interviews in those native languages very difficult and very, very expensive

–The sample size of Asian Americans polled in its surveys is too small to be able to break out the data within a reasonable margin of error.

Those reasons sounded familiar because they are.

Dr Greer’s 2003 study for AAJA interviewed researchers from numerous polling organizations to find out why the opinions of Asian Americans are rarely broken out in polls.

The reasons listed include:

The limited Resources

 “As with any smaller group, time and money are the major reasons we don’t do it.” said one pollster

The multiple languages spoken in the Asian American community

“Surveying Asian Americans in languages other than English presents a much bigger challenge because of the logistical issues,” according to one polling director.

The smaller percentage of Asian Americans when compared to Caucasians makes breaking out Asian American voters in political polling difficult

“It just doesn’t pay to do it,” said one pollster. “It’s knocking down an already small sample.”

In other words, the reasons why data on Asian Americans wasn’t broken out from the data in polls conducted in 2003 are roughly the same reason they still don’t do it in 2013—time, money, and overall sample size.

So those are the reasons, but do those reasons have to be insurmountable?

A lot has happened in ten years.

Facebook launched in 2004 and changed how we stay in touch with our friends.

Twitter established itself in 2006 and opened up a whole new way for the world to get its news.

And in just over a year, Instagram has attracted over 100 million users utilizing an easier method for sharing photos and videos.

Yet, polling methods have not advanced enough to be able to include on a more regular basis the fastest growing demographic in the country—Asian Americans.

I wanted to know why and set out to find out if there was any hope that in the future this situation would change.

I talked to three pollsters, including two who have conducted polls that broke out data from Asian Americans.

Taeku Lee is co-principal investigator of the National Asian American Survey, a multi-lingual exit poll of Asian Americans in the 2012 presidential election and a professor of political science at U.C. Berkeley.

Corey Cook is an associate professor at the University of San Francisco. He conducted a multi-lingual poll on the 2011 mayor’s race in San Francisco which saw Ed Lee become the first Asian American ever to be elected mayor in San Francisco.

Norman Nie founded Knowledge Networks, a survey research firm which conducts polling via the internet.

“We surveyed in Spanish and Chinese language because you tend to under represent those groups,” said  Cook about his multi-lingual telephone poll on the 2011 San Francisco mayor’s race. “We did a language oversample and a separate cell only sample. Then you weigh certain characteristics. You have demographic variables that match the population. For our mayoral survey, we had 100 extra bilingual pollsters, 50 Chinese and 50 Spanish speaking.”

That effort was not cheap. He estimated multi-lingual polling added an additional 60 to 75 percent to the cost of the survey. He also said it was necessary to oversample Chinese and Spanish-speaking voters in order to decrease the margin of error. If you don’t, in a typical poll with 1,000 voters surveyed, your margin of error for Chinese Americans would have been an unacceptable plus or minus 20 percent.

“What you do is oversample the group and you weigh it back so as not to have the overall results skewed,” said Cook.

As previously stated Cook’s survey, as are most, was conducted via telephone. A growing number of pollsters, says Cook, see web based polling as the way of the future.

Taeku Lee of UC Berkeley who conducted a multi-lingual exit poll of the 2012 presidential race, says the biggest advantage of web based polling is that it’s cheaper than traditional telephone polling or even face to face polls. He says it’s also easier to ask sensitive questions about discrimination and attitudes about racial minorities via the web.

But the greatest disadvantage of such polling, he says, may be achieving a representative sampling.

“Most of what you see as web-based surveys claims to be representative, but they are not,” said Lee. “They are representative in the sense of what survey researchers call “quota sampling”: that is, they get enough respondents in various key demographic buckets. Sounds like “representative” to most people, but not representative in the sense of equal (in a true random sample).”

Norman Nie is considered a pioneer in web based polling. He co-founded Knowledge Networks which maintains a representative panel of Hispanics in the United States.

He calls web based polling, “the only way to do it.”

So could web based polling be the answer to giving Asian Americans a greater voice in polling results?

“This is a solution, but it depends on how much money you want to put into it, “ cautioned Nie.

The greatest obstacle is to locate a representative sampling of Asian Americans from which a large enough sample could be surveyed.

Nie said it took approximately $3 million – $4 million to build Knowledge Networks panel of Hispanics in the United States. Then he says there’s an additional cost of 20 percent a year to keep the sampling up to date.

Nie is no longer with Knowledge Networks, but the company confirmed it does not have a separate panel dedicated to Asian Americans.

He said to build such a panel, it would cost at least as much as it cost to build Knowledge Network’s Hispanic panel–$3- $4 million.

So far no polling organization has shown a willingness to spend that kind of money. Perhaps a foundation or a generous donor or donors would be willing to fork over the money to a non-profit to establish a panel of Asian Americans.

That same non-profit would have to be willing to make its panel cheap enough to pollsters to get them to pay out a fee to gain access to that panel, but also large enough to support a minimal staff and to maintain and update the panel each year.

Or perhaps pollsters need to come up with new, but less expensive ways to poll an adequate sample of Asian American voters. Seriously, how much thought have pollsters given to solutions to this problem? Only they know the answer to that. If these bright minds put any reasonable effort into this, I’m confident a solution can be found.

Pipe dream? Perhaps. But Jack Dorsey had such a dream when he founded Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg had a dream when he launched Facebook as a student, and Kevin Systrom & Mike Krieger had a dream when they launched Instagram.

Until just one person dreams big and shows a willingness to find a solution, we will be taking out about this same problem ten, 20, even 30 years from now.

2003aapollsreport

1 COMMENT

  1. RE: Money Could Give Asian Americans a greater voice: I’m tempted to hear all these reasons as “It’s not worth it.” And there’s some truth to that. At least my takeaway from this that these studies don’t serve us Asian Americans as much as I thought. Perhaps we need to be more vocal to be counted. It reminds me of the reasons why politicians don’t bother campaigning in Chinatown: not enough people vote.

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