Survey of Arab-Americans sets off disputes

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When researchers decided to survey attitudes, values and the impact of September 11 among 1,000 Arab-Americans in the Detroit area, they saw their study as a groundbreaking attempt to accurately portray a community that felt stereotyped and under siege.
But perhaps inevitably the research team – from the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research – ran into criticism and concern.
First came questions about the study’s confidentiality. The three-county region has one of the nation’s largest, most concentrated communities of Arab-Americans, some 100,000 to 300,000 people, and there were fears about bias attacks and eroding civil liberties. Some Arab-American scholars were miffed that there was only one Arab-American among seven researchers.

Then there were concerns about the survey’s methods. Was “Arab-American” defined by region or language? For example, Chaldeans, primarily Christian Iraqis who speak Aramaic as well as Arabic, wanted to be part of the survey but didn’t always identify themselves as Arab-American.

Just how sensitive and informed were the researchers and interviewers about Arab-Americans?
Preliminary findings of the $790,000 study are expected to be released in January, and ultimately many scholars predict that it will create a comprehensive view of Arab-Americans. But the cacophony surrounding it, reported in May in The Chronicle of Higher Education, is emblematic of an old controversy among social scientists that is far from resolved: the gap between those who live in a community and those who study it...

“It was recognised that this was a tense geopolitical moment,” Featherman said of the timing of the Detroit survey, which began a year ago and is mostly financed by the Russell Sage Foundation....

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