| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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As Yen Le Espiritu (1992) notes, “Panethnic groups in the United States are products of political and social processes, rather than of cultural bonds” (p. 13). Unfortunately, this diversity has not been adequately studied in the Asian American population. The terminology used to describe Asian Americans and other racial/ ethnic minorities will be discussed in this work. Specifically, an emphasis will be placed on distinguishing between the terms race, panethnicity, and ethnicity as there has been considerable debate in the psychological literature regarding the use and definition of these terms.
As race and ethnicity are terms that are socially constructed in the United States, often for political and economic reasons, it is important that researchers studying racial and/or ethnic-specific identity in Asian American populations acknowledge this fact and incorporate these important distinctions into their research designs. Because researchers have often studied the ethnic-specific identity of a variety of Asian American ethnic-specific groups in one study and labeled it as a study of “Asian Americans” or “Asian American identity,” the specificity of the research has been diluted through this somewhat loose use of terms. One must ask whether the goal of the research is to examine racial (Asian American) identity or the ethnic-specific identity of several ethnic-specific groups (e.g., Chinese, Korean, Japanese, etc.) in a given study. If the terms racial and ethnic-specific are conceptually distinct (as many researchers would agree that they are), then they should be defined within research designs and empirically measured as such in studies that examine racial and ethnic-specific identity. In the present state of the literature, it is unclear what an “Asian American racial/ethnic-specific identity” is both conceptually (as it has been defined) and empirically (as it has been measured) in previous studies (see Alvarez & Helms, 2001; Lee, 2003; Lee & Yoo, 2004, Suinn et al., 1987, 1992).