DOI: 10.3886/icpsr31481.v1
title: National Asian American Survey, 2008
title: Version 1

description: The 2008 National Asian American Survey (NAAS) contains 5,159 completed telephone interviews of self-identified Asian/Asian American residents of the United States. Interviewing began on August 12, 2008, and ended on October 29, 2008. The survey instrument included questions about political behavior and attitudes as well as personal experiences in immigration to the United States. Topics include attitudes toward government, politics and political issues, extent of political involvement, party affiliation, sources of political information, voting behavior, health and financial status, racial and ethnic identification, linked fate and discrimination, and religious and ethnic social networks. The overall length of the interview was approximately 29 minutes. The NAAS includes adults in the United States who identify any family background from countries in Asia, exclusive of countries classified as the Middle East. Survey interviews were conducted in eight languages (English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Japanese, and Hindi) -- chosen according to the interviewee's preference -- and yielded sample sizes of at least 500 adult Asian American residents in the six largest national-origin groups. The final breakdown was 1,350 Chinese, 1,150 Asian Indian, 719 Vietnamese, 614 Korean, 603 Filipino, and 541 Japanese origin respondents, with 182 additional respondents who are either from other countries in Asia, or who identify as multi-racial or multi-ethnic. Overall, 40 percent of the sample chose English as their preferred language for the interview. The sample is weighted, using a raking procedure, to reflect the balance of gender, nativity, citizenship status, and educational attainment of the six largest national-origin groups in the United States, as well as the proportion of these national-origin groups within each state. Demographic information includes age, race, language, gender, country of birth, religion, marital status, educational level, employment status, citizenship status, household income, and size of household.
description: The 2008 National Asian American Survey was conducted in order to study and predict the role Asian Americans play in political elections, particularly the 2008 presidential election.
description: Post-stratification weights (NWEIGHTNATYRS) were created using a raking procedure to reflect the balance of gender, nativity, citizenship status, and educational attainment of the six largest national-origin groups in the United States, as well as the proportion of these national-origin groups within each state. More details about the weighting procedure can be found in the book "Asian American Political Participation: Emerging Constituents and their Political Identities" (Wong, Ramakrishnan, Lee, and Junn. 2011, Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation).
description: ICPSR data undergo a confidentiality review and are altered when necessary to limit the risk of disclosure. ICPSR also routinely creates ready-to-go data files along with setups in the major statistical software formats as well as standard codebooks to accompany the data. In addition to these procedures, ICPSR performed the following processing steps for this data collection: Created variable labels and/or value labels.; Created online analysis version with question text.; Checked for undocumented or out-of-range codes..
description: Response Rates: Forty-seven percent of respondents agreed to take the survey, resulting in a 12 percent rate of all valid numbers dialed.
description: Datasets: 
 
 DS1: National Asian American Survey, 2008
description: computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) 
To help protect confidentiality of subjects, any county or state where the relevant national origin group has fewer than 5,000 residents is labeled as "PROTECTED". In addition, any county or state is labeled as "PROTECTED" where the respondent's ethnicity is NOT Asian Indian, Bangladeshi, Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Hmong, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Pakistani, Taiwanese, Vietnamese.
 Additional information can be found on the NAAS Web site.
description: The universe of analysis contains 5,159 completed telephone interviews of self-identified Asian/Asian American residents of the United States. This is approximately 88 percent of the United States Asian/Asian American adult population. The final breakdown was 1,350 Chinese, 1,150 Asian Indian, 719 Vietnamese, 614 Korean, 603 Filipino, and 541 Japanese origin respondents, with 182 additional respondents who are either from other countries in Asia, or who identify as multi-racial or multi-ethnic. Smallest Geographic Unit: county
description: Several strategies of sampling were used to collect the data. The largest number of cases were completed interviews drawn from a random selection of respondents in a listed sample of high-probability Asian Americans. This listed sample was drawn from a commercial database of voter registration and marketing, with ethnic propensity classifications based on ethnic names, surnames, and geographic density. Two additional strategies of RDD were used to select respondents, the first from a set of telephone numbers generated to maximize the probability of Filipino Americans, and a second set of telephone numbers generated for the population in general. The general population RDD yielded a very small number of completed interviews relative to contacts made by interviewers (8 out of 1,028 attempts) primarily as a result of the low incidence of the Asian American population in the United States. The sampling design was stratified to collect a disproportionately high number of respondents from "new immigrant destinations" as defined by Audrey Singer of the Brookings Institution. In their raw format, 22 percent of the cases were selected from counties in new destinations while the remaining 78 percent were representative of the United States population. Cases were weighted to account for this stratified sampling design. Additional details about sampling and weighting can be found in the book "Asian American Political Participation: Emerging Constituents and their Political Identities" (Wong, Ramakrishnan, Lee, and Junn. 2011, Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation).