A Breakthrough In AAPI Polling

Asian Americans are the country’s fastest-growing demographic. But they’re routinely left out of public opinion polls. A new collaboration led by a UC Riverside professor will produce in-language monthly polls, gauging Asian Americans’ views on everything from the presidential race to racism.

Accurate surveys of Asian Americans need to include immigrants who make up a majority of the population and who may not speak English as their first language. Providing in-language surveys is expensive and as a result, pollsters often don’t get a large enough sample size of Asian Americans, said Karthick Ramakrishnan, a public policy professor at UC-Riverside and founder of the research group, AAPI Data.

“Most survey firms don't have the resources to support it,” Ramakrishnan said. “Or I guess you could say they don't prioritize it enough.”

Ramakrishnan's group AAPI Data has teamed up with the much-larger Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research to produce the polls.

“We can't understand America, if we don't understand Asian American and Pacific Islander communities,” Ramakrishnan said. “They are so integral to what it means to be an American. Period.”

Funding for the project has come from groups such as AARP.

Hundreds of Asian Americans around the country have been recruited to join a panel. The first survey will have more than 1,000 respondents. The goal is to grow the panel to 1,500 to 2,000, and have the critical mass of panelists to break out their responses by categories such as country of origin.

There will be translations available in some of the most commonly-spoken Asian languages, such as Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean.

The first report comes out on Nov. 14, and will measure opinions on presidential candidates and discrimination against Asians.