The 25-minute telephone interviews, gleaned from registered voter rolls in 18 minority-rich states, will be available in six languages: English, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean and Vietnamese.
The National Politics Study, led by University of Michigan associate professor Vincent Hutchings in 2004, was billed as the “first multiracial and multiethnic national study of political and racial attitudes.” Like the Multi-Racial, Post-Election Survey, it featured interviews with large samples of Blacks, Asians, Hispanics and Whites. It also included a Black Caribbean American sample. It offered interviews in English and Spanish, but not in other languages.
“What that really means is the Asian American (sample) is quirky, because we only interviewed the Asian Americans who were sufficiently fluent in English,” Hutchings says of his survey, which the eight researchers are using as a model for the Multi-Racial Post-Election Survey. He offers kudos for the multilingual effort. “That is impressive.”
Hutchings says that researchers need the broader-based studies like those he conducted in 2004 and the one that will begin Friday, because most other surveys focus on one or two racial or ethnic groups.
“The point is, that most of these academic studies tended not to be so ethnically and racially diverse,” Hutchings says. “Commercial polls have done some comparable things. But those studies are typically far less nuanced and far more interested in a quick-shot telephone study that focuses on some candidate or some set of candidates. They don’t have the same rich battery of questions that academic surveys tend to have.”
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