Overcoming Constraints of the Model Minority Stereotype to Advance Asian American Health

Asian Americans are the fastest growing U.S. immigrant group, projected to become the largest immigrant group by 2065, but the quantity of research on Asian Americans' health has not mirrored changing demographics. Asian Americans have been understudied for more than 25 years, with only 0.17% of National Institutes of Health (NIH) expenditures allocated to projects including Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander populations (Ðoàn et al., 2019). This disproportionality may result in part from the model minority stereotype (MMS) being extended to health, perpetuating the ideas that Asian Americans are well-positioned with regard to health status and that associated research is not essential. Accordingly, the aims for this article are threefold: (a) bring attention to the inadequate representation of the Asian American population in health-related science, (b) question the MMS in health, and (c) outline potential pathways through which the MMS limits what is knowable on Asian American health issues and needs. We discuss the limited meaningfulness of nonrepresentative aggregated statistics purporting the model minority image and provide counterexamples. We also present a stereotype-constraints model with the MMS contributing to a bottleneck for Asian American health-related knowledge, accompanied by present-day circumstances (e.g., sparse data, few psychologists/behavioral medicine scientists focused on Asian American health). We conclude with initial recommendations for addressing MMS-associated constraints in psychology and more broadly. Public Significance StatementThe model minority stereotype applied to Asian Americans' health needs to be interrogated and overcome to advance all Asian American populations' health and well-being.