American Muslim Poll 2022: A Politics and Pandemic Status Report

Fielded between mid-February and mid-March, American Muslim Poll 2022: A Politics and Pandemic Status Report provides a snapshot of American Muslims and Americans of other faiths as well as no faith two years into the COVID-19 pandemic as we enter a new phase of living with the virus. In its sixth installment, this poll presents an updated demographic profile of American Muslims, measured the Islamophobia Index, and expands on areas of study of institutional and individual Islamophobia and bullying to cover not only “brick and mortar” engagements but online spaces.

On this episode of Deep Dives with ISPU, Director of Communications, Katherine Coplen, interviews Dalia Mogahed, ISPU's Director of Research and the poll's co-author, on the poll's research processes and findings.

Related resources to this episode:

• American Muslim Poll 2022

Transcript

Katherine Coplen: 0:06

Welcome to deep dives with ISPU, a podcast by the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. I'm Kat Coplen, ISPU's director of communication. ISPU's mission is to provide objective research and education about American Muslims to support well informed dialogue and decision making. A key way we do this is by publishing our American Muslim Poll, a landmark publication that surveys Americans of various faith groups as well as no faith and a sample of the general public. This nationally representative survey provides a wealth of insights into issues impacting Muslims and the United States, and shows their perspectives within the context of our nation's faith landscape, not as an isolated specimen. We've seen research findings from our polls cited everywhere from small community organizations and schools, to the policy platforms of presidential candidates, to national health organizations, to international media outlets, and to mosques and other faiths centers in our neighborhoods. Today, I'm so pleased to be joined by Dalia Mogahed, the driving force behind ISPUs American Muslim Poll, she has co-authored each of our six polls beginning in 2016. And she serves as ISPU's director of research where she leads our pioneering work. Dalia, thank you so much for joining us, I'm really excited to have an opportunity to discuss this publication with you. So happy to do this. It's my by far my favorite project of mine as well, I have to say I'm partial to it. So let's start at the very beginning. Every once in a while I hear from someone and they say how can I take the poll? And I have to say, you know, that's not exactly how it works. I love to just, you know, start, start with the structure, who are the people that are answering the questions that make up the results of our poll? What is nationally representative surveying look like?

Dalia Mogahed: 2:02

Okay, so really good question. So the reason that we can't, the reason we can't have people just decide they want to take the poll is that would bias the sample, those kinds of polls are self are are sort of self selective. So I decide I want to take a poll. That means, you know, the poll is of people who like taking polls, or the polls of people who happen to be on that Facebook page, whereas our polls, people are selected to take it to make sure the sample is well, you know, representative of the entire populations. So we subcontract a really reputable firm called SSRS, to do our surveys. And what they do is they go back into their database of Muslim households that they have found completely at random when they're doing other polls of the American population at home as a whole. And then they randomly select a sample of 800 households to take the poll. And that way, it's a representative sample. It includes young and old men and women, all the race groups that make up American Muslims, and arm and the sample ism bias towards someone who, you know, is happening to see the poll on a Facebook page or is my friend or whatever, that's, that's really the weakness of polls that aren't representative is they will often, you know, be part of the people who take it will will have some connection to the researcher. Whereas in this case, we have two degrees of separation where the people who take the poll, have no connection to ISPU whatsoever.

Katherine Coplen: 4:03

Thank you so much. This is exactly what I love about working at ISPU, you we can start a podcast and dive right into the methodology. I just love it. So we kind of got into how our polls year after year are, are done. Now I'd like to kind of step back and take the 10,000 foot view. When I describe the American Muslim poll to people who have you know, who've never read it before I say, you know, it is really good way to understand what Muslims in America look like in this year, you know, what we know about this community? So every year we kind of add some different kinds of colors to that understanding. We add new questions and new kind of lenses. What demographic factors did we add in this year that add to this rich story we can tell about Muslims living in the US?

Dalia Mogahed: 4:56

So we've added a couple of things that I thought were really interesting. One thing we've asked people if they've sought served in the military. So now we know that around 10% of American Muslims have served in the American military, similar to other faith communities and they and the general public. So that's always been a question that's been out there. Like how many Muslims are in the military doesn't serve in the military? Do they? Do they not? And now we know the answer, or the really literally the first time we have concrete numbers. Another question that I loved asking was around job creation. Now we have an estimate a very conservative estimate, actually, of how many jobs Muslims create in America, and it's more than a million jobs. So you know, Muslims create more jobs, then the Chrysler company, Muslims create more jobs than, you know, all the all the big, big car manufacturers in Michigan combined. It's, it's a really interesting number to have, because it starts to show the the real impact of of having, you know, Muslims call America home and all the contributions they make. So that was that has been a really interesting demographic addition as well.

Katherine Coplen: 6:15

Thank you so much, Dalia. You know, I've said it a lot of presentations, and in webinars where you've presented poll data. And there are some results that come out kind of year, over a year, you know, around things that now feel very familiar to us. But to people hearing this for the first time, they say, Wow, I did not know that about Muslims in America. I'm thinking you know, about their the age data, I'm thinking about our education data, can you share, you know, some of the things that stay consistent that we now know, about Muslims in America that we that we share all the time?

Dalia Mogahed: 6:55

Sure. I mean, one of the things that we do fine, of course, over and over is the relative youth of American Muslims, that the average age for American Muslims is, at least, you know, 20 years younger than the average age of the general public, one in four American Muslims or be between the age of 18 and 24. So a very young compared to, you know, about only about 10%. In other faith communities that are in that younger age range, just a dis proportionate percentage of American Muslims are very, are young, or young people are productive people are people who are employed, working, starting families, it's a very dynamic community in that regard. It's also community with a disproportionate percentage of the community that came of age or was born after 911 2001. And there is an impact of that, you know, of that of that age. That youth bulge, if you will, on the collective psyche of the American Muslim community were so many in the community, such a large segment have only known in America that is post 911. I think that's it, that's very important to also keep in mind. Another, you know, established fact that you've probably gotten tired of hearing but many people don't know is that it's by far the most diverse ethnically and racially, faith community in America, by far there's no majority race, there's about an equal breakdown of Muslims who identify as black, white, Asian, and Arab. And finally that, you know, Muslims education level is on par with Christian Americans. It's, it's about, you know, about the same. And when it comes to comparing men and women, interestingly, women tend to be more likely to have higher educational attainment than them. Every year, I love to ask, and we get a sneak peek, because we see this before we publish it to the wider public. But every year, as soon as the results come in, and the writing begins, I love to ask the research team, what's the most personally exciting finding that we discovered that year? So what tops your list in 2022? You know, really top my list. And it was it was an exciting finding, not because it was a positive finding, but it was just something that I thought was so important, is we discovered that, like, Muslims were among the most likely to report experiencing some kind of voter suppression. And I had no idea that that was happening. So I felt like that was really exciting because it was, it was a discovery that no one knew. I'd never heard anyone say that, I had never read it. We were taught and I mean, voter suppression has been such a topic of conversation in our country, and Muslims are not being really discussed in that regard. And now we have this information that says, what, you know, this group, strangely enough has, is more likely to report experiencing or perceiving to have experienced voter suppression and then other faith communities. And why is that? And we were able not just to realize that they were experiencing it, but it is higher rate, but also in what ways they were experiencing it, which I was so excited to see.

Katherine Coplen: 10:43

We fielded a lot of questions around one topic in particular, and that is our internalized Islamophobia findings this year. Can you talk a little bit about our Islamophobia index, and what we found in this year's polling?

Dalia Mogahed: 10:59

Absolutely, so we developed something called the Islamophobia index. And what it is, is a measure of public endorsement for anti Muslim tropes. So there are five anti Muslim tropes that we look at. And we we chose those five, because other research that we built on indicates that endorsing those tropes is linked to accepting anti Muslim and anti democratic policies. So this, these are important to measure because they sort of predict the public going along with oppressive state policies against minority groups, and even just against the majority in terms of suspending basic rights. And so we've been measuring this these, you know, agreement with these five stereotypes over time. And what we've found this year, is an alarming trend that we've actually been seeing now for a couple of years of Muslims themselves, internalizing anti Muslim stereotypes. And it's been slowly building up ever since Trump was elected, over those, you know, four years and now two years into the Biden administration. And it's especially prevalent again, among young Muslims and among Muslims who identify as white. Now, the question is always like, what, so white Muslim, it's not someone we you know, it's not a group that we've assigned, but we asked him in our standard demographic questions for people to identify their racial background, and people who identify as white are more likely, in our research to also endorse anti Muslim tropes. We have, you know, some theories on what is going on. But we're, we're, it's still something we have to research more about. The issue is also among young people, young people are more likely to endorse and internalize these anti Muslim tropes than older Muslims. So the, you know, steady drumbeat of anti unwholesome messaging in political conversations in the media hasn't impacted and it doesn't, and no one is immune to it, not even Muslims themselves.

Katherine Coplen: 13:30

Yeah, thank you for that answer. And for kind of digging into that finding a little bit. That's something that I appreciate so much about. The American was simple, which is, you know, we can anticipate that that steady drumbeat you reference would have an impact. But now we're quantifying what is that input packed look like. And we have scholars on on our team, ISPU scholars, who have been able to kind of shed light on different aspects of this finding. We actually had a long discussion about this, in particular, on our poll publication day, back in August, and you can watch a recording of that conversation with several ISP scholars kind of adding their take on on this finding and what needs to be researched further in the future, on our Facebook page, Twitter, etc. Also in our newsletters, so one last question for you, Dalia. We are not done releasing research from the 2020 poll. There's so much more to dig into what's to come in a future release? Yes, absolutely. There's so much more. We are doing a future report on banking while Muslim. What are the experiences of both individuals and institutions in in their banking and and is there is there a problem there or not? That's going to be I think a really important analysis.

Dalia Mogahed: 15:00

As we're also doing another analysis on the Muslim family, what does the Muslim family look like? What are the demands and challenges facing the Muslim family in America and we're also doing more qualitative research on this issue of internalized Islamophobia.

Katherine Coplen: 15:23

Dalia, thank you for your time today. Every chance I get to talk to you about this publication I learned more and I really appreciate that.

Dalia Mogahed: 15:30

Thank you for having me Kat.

Unknown: 15:34

Thank you to Dalia for joining us today on Deep Dives with ISPU. Read our poll in full at ISPU dot O R G backslash poll. There are six years of archives to dig through at that link as well. 2022 is ISPU's 20th anniversary. For more information on how to get involved visit ISP dot O R G backslash 20 years. Thanks for tuning in to Deep Dives with ISPU, we'll see you next time.