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Is Asian Hate Just About Race? Religious Discrimination and Smoking Among Asian and Asian American Adults in the USA

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Abstract

Prior research has shown that experiencing religious discrimination is tied to adverse physical and mental health outcomes. However, less known is whether or not religious discrimination may influence one’s risk of smoking. In particular, there is a paucity of research examining the impacts of religious discrimination on smoking for Asians in the United States, whose experience of religious discrimination is heavily racialized. To fill in these gaps, in this study, 356 Asian and Asian American adults living in the US were surveyed. The key results suggest that perceived religious discrimination was associated with a higher risk of smoking among Asians and Asian Americans. Meanwhile, this deleterious effect of religious discrimination does not vary by important sociodemographic variables, such as ethnicity, religious identity, gender, and acculturation. Surprisingly, once controlling for religious discrimination, racial discrimination was no longer associated with smoking. Therefore, when it comes to smoking, it may be possible that religion is a more hazardous source of minority stress than race for Asians and Asian Americans.

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Data Availability

The data and other materials needed to duplicate and replicate the findings in the paper will be made available upon request.

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Acknowledgements

The survey instrument was developed in collaboration with Dr. Flavio Rogerio Hickel Jr (Washington College), Dr. Leah Payne (Portland Seminary), and Dr. Tarah Williams (Allegheny College) who served as Public Fellows with the Public Religion Research Institute from 2022-2023. The author would like to thank them for their valuable contributions to the development of the survey.

Funding

This work was generously supported by a grant from the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and education organization based in Washington, D.C., USA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA

    Fanhao Nie

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  1. Fanhao Nie
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Correspondence to Fanhao Nie.

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Ethics Approval

This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the IRB of Washington College in March 2023.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Nie, F. Is Asian Hate Just About Race? Religious Discrimination and Smoking Among Asian and Asian American Adults in the USA. J. Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40615-024-01941-1

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