Why Asian Americans often appear underrepresented in polling and research

Often, members of the AAPI community will see a national poll that doesn't have a category for Asian Americans and wonder, "Why weren't we included in this?"

There are almost 20 million people of Asian descent in the U.S. But if you looked at national polling and medical research, they might appear largely invisible in important conversations about politics, race and other issues, a factor that has plagued the Asian community and other minorities for decades. According to Neil Ruiz, the associate director of race and ethnicity research at Pew Research, Asians tend to be underrepresented in national polling where about 3% of the respondents identify as Asian American, which is lower than their share of the total population of 6%. "We correct for this in our weighting by weighting up the Asian American respondents to be represented proportional to their share of the population," Ruiz added.