Asian Americans and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders face food insecurity — here’s why you haven’t heard about it
Finding ourselves in the data as two Asian American data scientists
According to a USDA 2022 study, 12.8% of households face food insecurity. This deceivingly small percentage reflects the realities of about 17 million households. While food insecurity is felt across all demographic groups, the rate for Asian American and Native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders (AA & NHPI) is difficult to uncover because they are folded into the “Other” category.
Not knowing the true rates of food insecurity in the AA & NHPI population has an impact on health outcomes and access to resources for this demographic. That’s why we, two Asian American data scientists, were inspired to begin working on disaggregating data on food insecurity within our population.
In this piece, we talk about what it felt like to work on research that reflected our own identities, and the steps we took to advance data representation for the AA & NHPI community.
Creating a pioneering survey panel
One of the best ways to get better representation in data is to create a survey panel.
A survey panel consists of recruiting individuals from a demographic of interest to provide targeted insights. For the AA & NHPI community, data has been difficult to collect because, until recently, a survey panel for this group did not exist.
With the goal of making data more inclusive and accessible, The Rockefeller Foundation provided AmeriSpeak, a panel-based research platform founded by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), with a grant to establish Amplify AAPI, the first nationally representative AA & NHPI panel.
“Outreach to the AA & NHPI population is difficult given barriers like language, culture, immigration status, and education level,” shares David Dutwin, Senior VP of Strategic Initiatives at AmeriSpeak. “Ensuring a representative sample of this demographic is costly and prohibitive for researchers. Through the creation of Amplify AAPI, an AA & NHPI survey panel, we seek to mitigate these issues.”
The Amplify AAPI panel provided an opportunity to see if we could, finally, uncover the lived realities of Asian Americans from different cultural backgrounds like ours.
In November 2023, we ran a survey to explore food and nutrition security in this population. According to our survey, 22% of the AA & NHPI population faces food insecurity. Of those individuals, 60% also face nutrition insecurity.
This is the first time we’ve been able to get a snapshot of food insecurity in this population nationwide. Read more about our survey results here.
Seeing ourselves in the data
In conducting this survey, we both independently discovered that our families faced food insecurity at some point in our childhoods. We reflected on how our experiences as Asian Americans, specifically Taiwanese and Bengali Americans, differed. This is a reflection of the broader range of lived realities within the AA & NHPI population–how factors like where you live, income, language, and access to community affect your situation.
So while it was great to be able to see an overall percentage of food insecurity for our demographic, we also hoped to uncover the differences in food security status across AA & NHPI ethnicities.
To do so, we conducted multiple regression analyses on the data from our food insecurity survey. Regression analysis allows us to determine the degree to which certain factors impact food insecurity. To illustrate this, let’s look at one of our central hypotheses: how ethnicity impacts food insecurity.
In the logistic regression model below, we looked at this relationship while controlling for income, region, and language spoken at home.
Our results indicated that Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander (NHPI) individuals were 6.9 times more likely to be food insecure than the reference group.
However, the model had a low R-squared value of 0.134 (above 0.5 is considered “good”). This indicates that the differences observed in the dependent variable, food insecurity, are not fully explained by this model.
In some ways, this was expected because food insecurity is an extremely complex variable–there are many factors that contribute to why someone may not have access to food. In addition, with a relatively small sample size for some demographic groups, namely NHPI and Vietnamese, we cannot account for the impact of selection bias on our results.
Why These Results Matter
While the observed R-squared value is low, this does not necessarily mean that the significant relationship observed between food insecurity and the NHPI population is baseless. For researchers who want to identify underlying patterns, it is often challenging to meet the standards of statistical significance and best-fit models typically expected. We want to offer a contrasting perspective, that even results that don’t meet these standards can offer important insights.
We know that data is imperfect, and it’s never going to explain everything. But if we accept the premise that it’s too difficult to try, then we’ll never get the kind of research and insights needed to help communities in need. This is the first time we have seen our own identities reflected in food security research nationally, and while we hope for further disaggregation into categories like Taiwanese and Bangladeshi, we are excited to enter the conversation here now.
