Community members representing various races, ethnicities, ages, genders, and people with disabilities stand on rectangular bars from a bar graph while holding up a line graph, conveying representative data collection. Photo credit: Gracia Lam
By Tina Kauh, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, December 7, 2023
To advance health equity, the research field and philanthropy must address underlying racism present in data collection.
My parents, like so many other immigrants, moved to America with dreams of a better life, full of opportunity for themselves and their children. My parents were Korean immigrants who left nearly everything when they came to the United States. For over three decades, they owned a corner store in Philadelphia where they worked long, physically demanding days while navigating numerous cultural and language barriers. False narratives about Asian Americans perpetuate beliefs that people like my parents were thriving because they weresuch “hard workers.” But I saw first-hand how the challenges they faced negatively impacted their social, emotional, and physical health and wellbeing.
As a graduate student, I wanted to study issues important to Asian Americans, but I couldn’t find data to support my work—because it did not exist. As a researcher, I developed proposals to collect data from Asian Americans, but the projects were not funded. Working in philanthropy, I’m interested in seeing research based on the experiences of Asian Americans. However, funding such projects has been challenging because there is a status quo belief about how much data collection should cost. Researchers who were willing to pursue this work reported legitimate and frustrating barriers: too often, it was perceived as time consuming or otherwise difficult to collect the needed data. And trying to meaningfully study a smaller subpopulation within the broader Asian American population was nearly impossible.
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