Methods and Processes
Community-Based Survey Design and the Politics of Data:
In developing the survey tool, we had a focused discussion on how we collected demographic data, particularly information on ethnic/racial identity, gender, socioeconomic class, age, and location.
Our considerations reflect observations from our communities, where people have felt excluded and limited by existing data categorization options. For example, Arab Americans have shared that the U.S. census refuses to recognize them. Asian American communities have also called for data disaggregation, the collection and reporting of data by detailed subgroups, as a means to better advocate for underserved communities. For example, Asian American and Pacific Islander communities have highly variable socioeconomic indicators around income, education, and employment, and aggregated data obscures vast disparities in wealth and access and can render the needs of specific communities invisible.
We aimed to develop categories based on communities’ languages for self-description, afford community specificity, and expand understandings of who ‘counts’ as Asian American and Pacific Islander.
For racial/ethnic identities, we offered 36 categories across nations, geographies, and diasporas connected to the continent of Asia, as well as categories of Black, Hispanic, Latina/o/x, and White. Survey participants could use multiple check-boxes to indicate as many categories of identification. Yet, identity categories transcend defined boundaries. They’re formed in the contexts of longer histories of imperialism and migration. They transform over time. In filling out their own identities, people included their ethnicities within regions and localities, such as Mon, Bicolano, and Peranakan; multiracial and mixed race as identities; diasporic identities outside of Asia, including the Caribbean and the Middle East; and additional categories of identification, such as Korean adoptees.
We also asked participants the degree to which they identified with categories, including Asian American, Pacific Islander, and their diasporic and/or ethnic identities to better understand the depth of identity-based affiliations. There are many reasons someone may click an identity on a form, such as it’s what has been externally socially and/or culturally reinforced. However, someone may check off their identity as Asian while also simultaneously strongly disagreeing with the statement “I identify as Asian American.” The question on degree of identity affiliation allows participants to indicate the saliency of an identity category.
For gender, categories in survey design have often limited available options within the binary of ‘female and male’ (and ‘other’). Or, even when gender categories become expanded during data collection, they can become re-sorted into the binary system. On our form, we used an open ‘type your answer here’ response format for gender. While many participants utilized dominant languages (ex: ‘female and male’) for identifying sex and gender, other participants drew on social, political, and cultural terms for gender identity. Participants used an array of language to describe gender fluidity, including genderqueer, nonbinary, they/them, and two-spirit. Some participants identified themselves as cis- or trans-; others used Asian languages to describe their gender. Some participants also wrote in refusals to share the information.
When discussing whether to collect information about socioeconomic status, we realized we didn’t specifically want to ask about income range. What we really wanted to know was someone’s educational background and access, particularly access to political education. Rather than ask about someone’s formal education (ex: high school, college, graduate school), we ended up framing questions about participation in community-based workshops and youth programs and access to Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies courses at the undergraduate and graduate level. We also asked about people’s participation in cultural and political organizations and volunteer work.
Our survey design reflected our experiences and observations within our communities and the complicated ways that people choose to identify (or not) with specific data categories. We aimed to set an inviting tone that also built trust with potential respondents by not enclosing them into narrow or binary categories.
I remember 18 Million Rising when they first launched in 2012. I was living in the Midwest and hadn’t yet started graduate school. I primarily looked to the Internet as a place for political education and found 18MR, an online organization that used technology and social media for organizing Asian Americans. I was also spending a lot of time on Twitter (I’ve been on the platform for over 10 years now) and found different friends in Asian American politics. When I moved to New York City, some of the people I ‘met’ via Twitter years ago eventually became close friends and collaborators. Some of these people were also staff alum or contributors to 18MR over the years.
Networks can be many interconnected threads of relationships built over time.
In 2015, I was working on my first research project on the Internet and racial justice and invited Cayden, their then-New Media Director for a campus panel on net neutrality and racial justice. However, it wasn’t until 2018 that I was starting my dissertation project on digital technologies and solidarities that I reached back out more formally to Cayden, who is now the Executive Director. Along the way, I’d continued following their different campaigns and often looked to them as a source of political analysis. I was in a post-proposal and pre-dissertation writing stage wondering ‘what comes next?’ and hoping to ground my research in ongoing community projects. We had our first conversation about a potential research collaboration in San Francisco at a conference in the spring, and touched base again in Detroit later that summer at different conference.
It wasn’t until the fall that a potential opportunity for a specific project emerged. Cayden introduced me to Bianca, who at the time was re-designing the 18MR website. Beyond aesthetic changes, a website re-design also changes the organizing structure and logics of a site especially as an organization has grown or transformed.
We discussed mutual goals for how a survey could support this process and ended up with two key questions: Who currently makes up ‘Asian American politics’ and how can we expand that? What political issue areas, themes, and topics were people interested in? How were people engaging with digital media technologies as places to build community and enact politics? The survey tool would be a way to assess the landscape of Asian American online politics, evaluate the impact of different digital tools, and identify opportunities and challenges in digital organizing.
I want to offer some meticulous details of putting together the survey; my research on social movements emphasizes processes—the work of networking—as a feminist intervention on results-oriented studies of politics. In that vein, I also want to uplift administrative and collective labor as part of research methodologies.
The survey tool itself took several months to design and launch. After working with Bianca, I was also introduced to Turner and Laura. For several months, prior to distributing the survey tool, we had a series of meetings and drafted and edited questions in multiple iterations and revisions of Google docs. We had documents outlining timelines and tasks. I applied for a small grant administrated by an institute run by a small staff of women that also took time and labor in processing receipts and organizing my paperwork. We sent a sample survey to other academic friends and collaborators to give feedback. Bianca carefully inputted all the survey questions from a Google doc into our survey tool. In developing a survey distribution plan, she also created graphics and we held conversations on what kinds of images and language we would use because textual and visual representation has an impact on outreach when it comes to a political community as diverse as Asian America. We leveraged expertise on organizing digital campaigns to launch the research tool: Turner worked on a social media toolkit and Laura created email campaigns.
I think we need to un-romanticize the image of a scrappy solo researcher. Most community research is underfunded and under-resourced, and most community partners are often under-staffed. Making something happen requires time, labor, and resources that aren’t always there.
I can be impatient and want to jump into action right away. In a field that primarily values outputs, there’s rarely a place for projects left dormant for long periods.
Yet, sometimes these periods of inertness can spark other things.
Since the start of the survey project, Bianca, Laura, and I, as well as another friend, have partnered to do workshops at different conferences. Over a period of ten months, Turner, Bianca, and Laura and I worked on a network gathering with the Asian American Feminist Collective for the 2020 Allied Media Conference. These relationships can also continue seeding new ideas. In one of the planning meetings this past spring, after the gatherings had to go virtual, we were discussing how to create intimacy over platforms like Zoom. As both of us taking notes in a Google doc, Bianca wrote me a quick message, ‘This seems in line with your research.’
Community-based research is often like a slow burn. The relationships have to come first before the research and the research alone shouldn’t be the sole basis of the relationships. It’s an ongoing process of building that requires alternate models of what we consider valuable and how we understand how knowledge gets produced.
On Community-Based Research Partnerships:
Process over output and relationships before research
Reflections by Rachel Kuo