Narrative Research: Understanding Our Audiences
As the fastest-growing racial group and electorate in the U.S., the next generation of AAPIs are a crucial group to understand and engage towards building a brighter future.
Many studies have looked at racial attitudes in the U.S. and found that communities of color, including Asian Americans, do not always share a common identity or sense of solidarity with each other. Yet race and ethnicity continue to play an influential role in politics and voters’ decisions.
If demographic research provides a limited understanding of how people relate to their own identities, other racial groups, and social issues, we must prioritize research to understand how people’s beliefs motivate their political choices.
With recent shifts from the Asian American electorate, our research around the diverse perspectives, attitudes, and mindsets that comprise our communities is a key starting point to understanding the fastest growing group of new voters.
Overview
In 2022, Asian American Futures (AAF) pioneered narrative research to better understand the next generation of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs), who constitute the fastest growing racial group in the US. Despite Millennial and Gen Z being the largest demographic within the AAPI community—at over 70% of all US-born Asians—this group is often overlooked in research efforts as well as by political and civic institutions.
Our growing presence, combined with our historic and cultural contributions and organizing capabilities, bear enormous potential to transform the future, but without spaces of belonging, AAPIs are susceptible to apathy and inaction, mis/disinformation, or being wedged against other communities of color around important issues like education, public safety, and economic justice.
Through surveys and in-depth qualitative interviews, we sought to understand the values that inform how people engage with social issues, and ultimately uncover opportunities to reach, influence, and engage the next generation of AAPIs towards meaningful and lasting change. While disaggregated data is important to Asian American research and understanding this generation, demographic markers like age and ethnicity—traditionally used to segment audiences—offer few clues about the perspectives, attitudes, and mindsets that comprise our communities.* Consisting of over 50 ethnic groups with vastly different histories and cultures, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are too often grouped into a monolith without regard for the complex stories and intersectional identities we hold.
Our narrative research serves a key starting point† to conduct additional analyses and fill remaining gaps—demographic and otherwise. Our first phase of research focused on Asian American audiences, and was inclusive of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) individuals. Many NHPI communities in the US share similarities with Asian Americans and other communities of color, but their marginalization within the AAPI umbrella further necessitates a separate, culturally-informed initiative led by and for NHPIs to ensure that their unique voices, experiences, and narratives are fully represented. In 2023, we launched a research project specifically focused on NHPI communities.
Our Process
To ensure that our research would follow sound practices and offer useful insights, we convened an advisory circle of experts in research, movement-building, and narrative strategy. This circle included Nadia Belkin (Asian American Power Network), Jeff Chang (Author and Narrative Strategist), Peter de Guzman (Tufts CIRCLE), Dora Guo (Xīn Shēng Project), Tiffany Huang (University of Pennsylvania), Timmy Lu (AAPI FORCE Education Fund) and Karthick Ramakrishnan (California 100).
We began by distributing a screener survey that collected 200 responses from Millennial and Gen Z AAPIs. The screener included questions about demographics, identity, religiosity, linked fate, experiences of discrimination, class background, economic mobility, education, occupation, issue opinions and values, and included free response questions. Most responses were sourced via ads on Instagram and TikTok—platforms on which our target audiences are heavily active—with additional posts shared by our grassroots community partners‡, on Reddit, and in AAPI employee resource groups at large companies.
After collecting survey responses, we interviewed 28 participants in 75-minute interviews. We asked participants about their survey responses, identity, experiences as AAPIs, top-of-mind issues and either their dreams for the future of AAPI communities or to share examples of how their perspective on AAPI identity and experience had shifted over time.
Participants also completed the OBI Audience quiz to expand our understanding of their psychological goals and cultural consumption, and map them alongside other audiences who are motivated by similar values. The four distinct audiences in the OBI segmentation have become a standard in narrative strategy and could help increase the accuracy of content testing in the future.
A preview of our key findings depicts where our audiences are starting:
Isolation and pain define what it means to be AAPI.
Big issues in the news feel weighty, but politics and policy don’t always seem like answers to their concerns.
Connection to heritage helps build pride in one’s ethnic identity, but not necessarily in a pan-AAPI or Asian American identity.
Dominant to Aspirational Narrative Framework
After assessing the narratives that dominate current AAPI experiences, we developed a narrative system—or framework—for narratives that are crucial to advance. This framework serves as a response to the harmful narratives that have defined our community for generations, from the externally imposed “perpetual foreigner” and “model minority,” to internalized narratives around assimilation and what it means to be “authentically” Asian.
Our framework provides a destination for AAPIs to move towards a world they not only want to see and inhabit, but will actively contribute to. If feeling perpetually foreign has dominated one’s engagement with social issues and the world at large, for example, we must prioritize and strategize around experiences that advance narratives of belonging, inclusion, and pride.
So many Asian Americans, especially East and Southeast Asians, have been mobilized by anti-Asian violence, meaning they are motivated by fear, anxiety, and anger—powerful emotions that can quickly lead to burnout. When AAPIs begin to act towards aspirational narratives instead of reacting to dominant narratives out of scarcity and fear, we will actively shape an AAPI story that is powerful, proud, and authentically ours.
We seek to advance the following deep narratives in all of our work:
Belonging: AAPIs deserve to be included, with intersectionality in mind, in politics, pop culture, news, social justice, and more.
Pride: AAPIs are not a monolith. We can be proud of our diversity in language, culture, ethnicity, and experience. How we unite and build strength in numbers may depend on the issue at hand.
Interdependence: AAPIs look out for each other and other communities. We work to ensure people and the environment are safe, healthy, and thriving.
Solidarity: AAPIs can connect to the struggles and experiences of people within and outside our communities. We are stronger and more powerful when we act in solidarity with others.
Self-Determination: AAPI communities deserve to govern and define themselves beyond war, imperialism, and violence.
Upcoming posts will detail opportunities and strategies for advancing these aspirational narratives among young AAPI audiences.
Narrative Personas
After evaluating all of the survey responses and interviews, we developed six audience personas to better understand which AAPI audiences are already sharing our aspirational narratives, and who has room to grow into them.
Our personas are fictional archetypes that contain information about:
Where our audiences fall on the spectrum of dominant-to-aspirational narratives
Dominant narratives that audience segments may be most susceptible to
Aspirational narratives that audience segments are most familiar with and already sharing
Our audiences’ orientation to their AAPI identity
Our audiences’ attitudes towards important issues such as education equity and public safety
What might alienate audiences from engaging with AAPI work (organizing, campaigns, etc)
Demographics typically associated with certain audience segments
Our personas portray our audiences with depth and complexity, offering clues for how they might think about important issues.
Pragmatic Strivers: Hard workers who lean into immigrant sacrifice and want representation for AAPIs in places of power and prominence
Compassionate Peacekeepers: Big-hearted helpers who yearn for belonging in dominant culture
Independent Skeptics: Young people seeking validation of their unique identities and experiences
Inclusive Optimists: Proud AAPIs who strive for inclusion and equity for all people, whether AAPI or not
Cultural Experimentalists: Progressives shaping an inclusive AAPI culture in the diaspora
Rooted in Heritage: People reconnecting to their heritage and keeping traditions alive
It’s crucial to understand the diverse perspectives, attitudes, and mindsets that comprise our communities to develop research-informed projects and programs that will create lasting change. Our personas and narrative insights have many applications that we have experimented with in partnership with various community organizations, and we look forward to sharing more of our findings with you.
*We acknowledge that some demographics, like immigration generation or language proficiency, can be useful shorthands when more comprehensive data is limited. We are excited to hear how movement organizations are understanding audiences that were less visible or not included in our initial research.
†Given that our project was qualitative in nature, that it was partly focused on California and that reaching a younger, AAPI audience through any survey or polling tool is immensely difficult, we were limited in achieving a scientifically representative sample. Instead, our research is a starting point to understanding a strategic audience.
‡Special thanks to our Gold Futures Challenge grantees who helped publicize the survey.