AAPI Data and SurveyMonkey report
New data on discrimination
Hello from SurveyMonkey!
Welcome back to our research newsletter, which we use to share timely, insightful data that we’ve compiled from the tens of thousands of respondents who take our surveys every day. Today’s update is a particularly important one.
Following the recent wave of violence against Asian Americans, we partnered with the team of academic researchers at AAPI Data to field a large, nationally-representative survey on discrimination in the U.S., putting a spotlight on the experiences of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community.
This project examines the prevalence of hate crimes and hate incidents, along with the day-to-day experiences of discrimination faced by people of color in the U.S.
Here are a few key stats from the research:
By nearly a three-to-one margin, Asian Americans see race relations as getting worse rather than better (56% to 19%)
One in 10 Asian Americans have experienced a hate crime or hate incident so far in 2021
31% of Asian Americans and 24% of Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders worry “often” or “all the time” about being a victim of a hate crime, about twice the national average of 14%
41% of Asian Americans have had people act as if they don’t speak English
We pulled several of these findings into a public Tableau dashboard, available here.
We encourage you to click through and use the three dropdown options to dig into the data. You can segment out the results among a specific race/ethnicity group (e.g. Asians and Asian Americans) by age, gender, foreign-born or U.S. born, and even by detailed ethnicity (e.g. East Asian vs. South Asian vs. Southeast Asian).
In some cases, this allows us to see how different the experiences are for different subgroups. For example, just 30% of Asian Americans say they would feel “very comfortable” reporting a hate crime to the authorities, compared with 42% of Hispanics, 45% of Blacks, and 54% of whites.
In other cases, it shows how stereotyping can cause all members of a particular subgroup to face unfair discrimination. For example, 64% of Asian Americans have “been asked where [they] are from, assuming that they are not from the U.S.” and these numbers are nearly identical among those Asian Americans who were born abroad (66%) and those who are native-born U.S. citizens (58%).
Read much more at the AAPI Data site: http://aapidata.com/blog/tip-iceberg-march2021-survey/
Or, see some early media coverage:
“One in four Asian Americans has experienced a hate incident, while more than two-thirds have been asked "where they're really from," a poll from Survey Monkey and AAPI Data published Tuesday has found.” by Niala Bodhoo in Axios (link)
"What they found is that Asian Americans are less likely to report hate crimes, they're not comfortable with it. They're worried that they may be attacked again." from Richard Lui on MSNBC’s the Reid Out (link)
“Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.) says there is underreporting of hate crimes by the Asian American community due to fear during an exclusive interview with Meet the Press.” from NBC (link)
Behind the numbers
Because Asian Americans make up a relatively small proportion of the total U.S. population (just about 6%), it’s often difficult to field a large enough survey to highlight the responses for this subgroup. It’s even more of challenge to further segment this diverse group of “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders,” a broad definition that comprises individuals from dozens of countries of origin, who may be native English speakers or who may speak many other languages, and who may have been living in the U.S. for generations or may be new immigrants.
In order to allow for deeper analysis, we fielded an oversample of Asian American and Pacific Islander respondents, with 2,017 out of the total 16,336 survey respondents identifying as AAPI. That includes 742 who identify as East Asian (Chineses, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, or Taiwanese), 436 who identify as South Asian (Bangladeshi, Bhutanese, Indian, Nepali, Pakistani, or Sri Lankan), and 680 who identify as Southeast Asian (Burmese, Cambodian, Filipino, Hmong, Indonesian, Laotian, Malaysian, Singaporean, Thai, or Vietnamese).
Part of the job of any survey is to give people a voice. We hope that this survey helps put a spotlight on the voices of those in the broader AAPI community, who oftentimes do not see their stories reported in-depth.
More from SurveyMonkey
Equal Pay Day, which fell on March 24th, marks how far into the year women have to work in order to match the amount of money that men made in the previous year. Women make $0.82 for every dollar that men earn, and women of color face an even more drastic gender gap in their pay. SurveyMonkey worked with LeanIn.Org to shed light on how women are adversely affected by the gender gap.
“According to new research by LeanIn.Org and SurveyMonkey, half of Latinas and Black women have struggled to pay for basic necessities like rent and childcare in the past year. Before the pandemic, a third of Black women and Latinas had less than $300 in savings. Now fully half of Latinas and Black women have less than $300 to fall back on. Three hundred dollars is barely a month’s worth of groceries. “
That’s all for this update! Thanks for reading and following along with us.