Guides: Asian American Religion: Data sources

Demographic data sources for Asian Americans

Social Explorer
Easy-to-use interface for tables and maps using decennial census, American Community Survey, and ARDA (religious institution) data for states and counties and other geographies including census tracts. Mapping data variables include ancestry, foreign-born, and Asian ancestry.
Data.census.gov (aka Explore Census Data)
The US Census Bureau's primary delivery platform - a free data site - for the American Community Survey, the most recent Decennial Census, and other Census Bureau data releases.
Population / U.S. Census Bureau
This topics page provides links to Census Bureau web pages on race, ancestry, foreign born status, and language use. These pages will provide links to recent Census Bureau publications and to data tables and tools.
Racial & Ethnic Minority Populations / U.S. Centers for Disease Control
Quick numbers on health: demographics and health statistics, 10 leading causes of death, high prevalence health issues, health disparities, and more, for Asian American, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Native Hawaiian & Other Pacific Islander, Multiracial, and White populations.
Immigration Statistics Data / U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Provides recent volumes of Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, with tables for country-of-origin and destination state and metro area.

Several data archives provide access to public opinion polls and social surveys. Typically, three forms of access might be provided:

Downloadable microdata datasets, either in SPSS or other statistical-software format or in ASCII-text format with SPSS or other software "setup" files. You will need to use statistical software, you may need to apply weights to the raw data to create population estimates.
Crosstabulation tools, providing data exploration and simple statistics for variables within the dataset.
Question databases, offering fulltext searching among questions on survey questionnaires, with frequency-response reports for each question. If you're lucky, you'll find questions with similar wording re-used over many years so that you'll be able to construct a trendline.

Roper Center for Public Opinion Research catalog
Free for Penn but requires personal registration. More than 20,000 public opinion polls and other surveys, 1935-present. Includes Pew Research Center and LA Times polls focusing on Asian Americans. Download datasets, links to RoperExpress crosstab tool and to iPOLL question database.
HINT #1! Search for surveys conducted among specific U.S. minority populations this way:
1. Country = United States.
2. Sample type = Asian% OR Chinese OR Japanese OR Korean%
HINT #2! Codebooks are more important than the datasets. Always read the codebook.
iPOLL @ Roper Center
Individual questions appearing in US nationwide public opinion polls, 1935-present, with frequency distributions for question responses. Links to RoperExpress (the Roper Center dataset catalog) and RoperExplorer (the Roper Center crosstab tool).
ICPSR - InterUniversity Consortium for Political & Social Research
Free to Penn but requires personal registration. The leading social science data archive. Provides dataset downloading, crosstab tools (aka "SDA"), and a question database. The link here points to "Social Institutions & Behavior : Minorities & Race Relations".
Resource Center for Minority Data @ICPSR
An ICPSR topical archive devoted to archiving and access to datasets on topics relevant to studying U.S. minority populations. Provides dataset downloading, crosstab tools (aka "SDA"), and a question database.