Asian American Journal of Psychology, Vol 16(1), Mar 2025, 25-36; doi:10.1037/aap0000344
Pan-ethnic labels such as “Asian” and “Asian American” are used to describe a vastly diverse group. However, the majority of those who would be described by others as Asian or Asian American do not choose to describe themselves with these terms (Ruiz et al., 2023). In this mixed method study, we used a Consensual Qualitative Research–Modified approach (Spangler et al., 2012) to inductively explore the preferred racial labels of 501 Asian American participants. The most common codes for racial self-identification were Asian (20%), Asian American (19%), Asian ethnic group (e.g., Korean; 17%), and Asian ethnic group plus American (e.g., Korean American; 11%). In addition to the racial self-identification codes, themes related to and beyond race emerged. For example, some participants elaborated on their racial and ethnic identites and specified other salient aspects (e.g., physical characteristics). Given the activist roots of the term “Asian American” (S. Sue et al., 2021) and heterogeneity within the group, we quantitatively examined if preferred racial labels were related to experiences of racism and demographic factors. While there were no demographic differences between the racial self-identification codes, there were significant differences in racism-related stress. Results from our study offer another dimension of diversity, chosen racial self-identification, which may be related to Asian Americans’ experiences with racism. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved)