Recent research on the collective identity label described as Asian American, which was originally formulated as a political movement symbol, shows only some support among the various Asian ethnic groups that reside in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Based on a sample of second-generation Asian American student leaders in four public universities, this study provides empirical evidence that the definition of the term Asian American has multiplied as a result of major demographic and cultural factors that have affected the Asian population. These definitions reflect ethnic and religious diversification as well as the model minority stereotype and a cohort identity for the second-generation experience. At the same time, this diversification of definitions is also influenced by two concurrent and interlacing cultural discourses, one that emphasizes the racialized otherness of being “Asian American” and another that emphasizes the cultural diversity within this racial label. Implications for future research and theoretical development follow.

Our original article espoused a simple way to recode religious groups on the General Social Survey (GSS) into historically meaningful categories and attempted to steer social scientists away from assigning these groups to a “Liberal-Moderate-Conservative” scale (Smith 1990). Among other problems, such scales create arbitrary cutpoints, have little to do with the historical movements that gave rise to particular religious affiliations and tend to conflate religious, economic, social and political ideas into one monolithic measure. In contrast, we assigned Protestants to mainline, evangelical and Black Protestant categories. In 12 short years, our classificatory system (RELTRAD) has become the standard way to code GSS affiliation data and has been utilized in many other survey efforts. Since its publication, no competing classificatory schemes have emerged to replace it. This article extends our earlier work and raises a series of theoretical and methodological issues for consideration by scholars in efforts to classify religious groups for analysis purposes.