How Many Asian American Buddhists Are There?
by Danny Fisher
Over at his blog Dharma Folk, Arun takes a stab at answering the question. He makes good cases for the correctives he offers to the Pew Forum’s flawed survey, but his arguments are also ripe for critical reflection. (For example, I would certainly question the assumption that the number of Spanish speakers who identify as Catholic is equal to the number of non-English-speaking Asian American Buddhists.) What do you think?
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Thanks for posting this, Danny. Sadly my post is not that clear, but that’s what I get for blogging at work
On the specific topic of Latinos who identify as Catholics, what I hoped to convey was not that I assumed the raw number to be the same for Asian Buddhists, or that I was even talking about non-English-speaking Asian Buddhists.
I assumed that the proportion of Asians Buddhists who were uncounted because of the Pew’s sampling method was the same as the proportion of Latino Catholics who went uncounted. As I mentioned, there are problems with this assumption (at least three that I can think of right now), but it was the best assumption that I had to work with. I just took a closer peek at the Pew study and found this number could be calculated yet another way.
So thank you again for posting this, I wouldn’t have noticed that if you hadn’t!