Protesters gathered in New York City in March in the wake of the Atlanta spa shootings to draw attention to escalating hate directed at Asian American

How science overlooks Asian Americans

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2021-07-12 13:00:06

Protesters gathered in New York City in March in the wake of the Atlanta spa shootings to draw attention to escalating hate directed at Asian Americans. Too often, Asian Americans are overlooked or treated as a monolithic group in research studies, rendering them invisible, researchers argue.

For years, sociologist ChangHwan Kim has sought to characterize the lives and experiences of Asian Americans. Gatekeepers in the research community, though, have often scoffed at his focus on a demographic group that looks like the picture of success in terms of education, earnings, health and other variables (SN: 4/14/21).

“In my experience, if I have a study with only Asian Americans, journals are reluctant to publish that work,” says Kim, of the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

An apparent lack of interest in studying Asian Americans isn’t limited to sociology; it even appears in medical research. At about 23 million people, Asian Americans represent about 7 percent of the U.S. population and are the fastest-growing demographic group in the country. Yet just 0.17 percent of the National Institutes of Health’s roughly $451 billion research funding between 1992 and 2018 went to clinical studies that included a focus on Asian Americans, researchers reported in 2019 in JAMA Network Open.

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