Summary
The purpose of this multicity, multiethnic, and multilingual survey was to provide a preliminary attempt to gauge the political attitudes and behavior of Asian Americans on a national scale. Major areas of investigation include ethnic identity, acculturation, homeland politics, voting and other types of political participation, political ideology, political partisanship, opinions on various social issues, social connectedness, racial integration, and group discrimination. Respondents were asked whether people of Asian descent had a great deal in common culturally, what they thought were the most important problems facing their own ethnic group, whether they belonged to any organization that represented the interest of their group, and their knowledge of the Wen Ho Lee case, the 8-20 Initiative, and other news stories and information about Asians in the United States. Political questions probed respondents' general interest in politics, whether and for whom they voted in the 2000 presidential election, their general knowledge of the presidential election process, the kinds of political activity in which they participated, their feelings about Asian-American candidates, their involvement with political parties, their level of trust in local, state, and federal government officials, self-identity with regard to a liberal vs. conservative stance on political matters, party affiliation, and how active they were in political parties or organizations in their home country if born outside of the United States. Respondents were also asked about their attitudes on such topics as immigration, affirmative action, job training, educational assistance, preferences in hiring and promotion, marriage outside of their ethnic group, and incidents of discrimination that they encountered. Demographic variables include language spoken in the home, religious preference, home ownership, ethnic origin of spouse, level of education, income, employment, age, and sex.
Citation
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Funding
National Science Foundation (SES-9973435)
KSCI-TV, Los Angeles
Subject Terms
Geographic Coverage
Smallest Geographic Unit
Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA)
Sample
Semi-random sample of households occupied by adults from one of the six major Asian-American ancestries selected to approximate the size of the ethnic population among Asian Americans according to the 1990 Census. Telephone households in the metropolitan areas of Los Angeles, New York, Honolulu, San Francisco, and Chicago were sampled using a dual-frame approach consisting of random-digit dialing (RDD) at targeted Asian ZIP-code densities and listed-surname frames.
Universe
Telephone households of Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, and Vietnamese families in the five major metropolitan areas of the United States where about 40 percent of the nation's Asian-American population resided in 2000.
Data Source
telephone interviews
survey data
Response Rates
The average incidence rate for interviews drawn from the listed surname sample is 41 percent, with a range from 14.5 percent for the Filipino sample to 81 percent for the Chinese sample. The incidence rate for RDD interviews is 15 percent, which ranges from 4.6 percent for the Korean sample to 24 percent for the Japanese sample. The average refusal rate is 25 percent, with 34 percent in the listed sample and 3.5 percent in the RDD sample.
Original Release Date
2004-05-05
Version Date
2004-05-05
Notes
Data in this collection are available only to users at ICPSR member institutions.
This study is provided by ICPSR. ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for a diverse and expanding social science research community.