Pew explains why it is so difficult to survey Asian Americans

Last March 20, Views From the Edge wrote a piece pointing out the need for the Pew Research Center to make more of an effort to include data on Asian Americans in their numerous surveys gauging national opinions broken down about race.

The Edge noted that in most surveys, Pew usually breaks down race to Blacks, Hispanics and Whites but neglects to gather data from Asian Americans because, the number of Asian Americans surveyed are too few to make their responses statistically representative of that demographic.

Pew wrote an article July 1 answering most of the Edge's criticisms, explaining why reaching out to Asian Americans is so difficult and are left out most polls.

"Asian Americans make up 5.9% percent of the U.S. adult population. That means that a perfectly representative national survey of 1,000 adults would include 59 Asian Americans – far too few to support reliable estimates," says the Pew Research Center article.

The article states that Pew "is committed to surveying people of all demographic backgrounds, but we only feel comfortable reporting the views of Asian Americans and other smaller groups when we are confident that the data paints an accurate picture."

Read the entire article from the Pew Research Center here.

Pew hopes that a shift from surveys done by phone to online questionnaires will help provide better access and more responses from Asian Americans.

Pew also acknowledges the diversity of the groups that fall under "Asian Americans" skews any response to the six majority subgroups of Chinese, Indian, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese.

When it comes down to it, more than too-few-to-count numbers, the reason Asian Americans are not often included is the money to do it right. In addition to increasing the number of respondents, it would involve hiring more staff, including translators of the dozens of languages used the different ethnicities and nationalities because relying on only English-speakers would skew the responses in other way because English-speakers tend to reflect more liberal views.

The Pew article doesn't address the issue that by separating Asian Americans from the other three major racial categories, reinforces the "otherizing" of Asian Americans and paints them as perpetually foreign.

Nevertheless, Pew and other pollsters need to find a way to include Asian Americans in these national surveys; otherwise, 23 million Americans will continue to not be heard on issues of national importance.