It seems that one of the trendiest things to do in the Iranian community nowadays, (other than avoiding any sort of action at all costs) is the perennial community Survey. Recently the Public Affairs Alliance of Iranian Americans (PAAIA [1]) in Washington, DC, the latest organization with the usual need to serve, announced the results of yet another survey [2], this time a Zogby phone survey! This implied secret-sauce of information and revelation of who we are, that will somehow explain our superiority, and cure all our ills, inspires and invites and begs deserved criticism.

Just ask me how I know!

If you know me as a writer for this site, you might know that by day, I am a marketing consultant with my own "sweet little company" that helps customers (some even Iranian!), understand the market they intend to serve, and helps them to properly position and target their products, message and interest at the right/best segment of that market. So they can sell more stuff.

Surveys can help sell. Especially when you don't know anything for certain, about a target group.

In 2004, after having worked as a volunteer with several local community groups in the San Francisco Bay Area (Society of Iranian Professionals, Iran heritage, Persian Center, BAIVoter, etc.), it became all too clear to me that the Iranian community had an identity credibility problem. We all knew who we were, we just didn't have any way to prove it. I kept running into this problem over and over again with my American friends, and often I felt like I was standing in a party saying how good Iranians were, and often, the sheer claim of outright superiority when it came to income, and education levels and other Iranian accomplishments, was rightly perceived as highly dubious, and a bit arrogant and show-offish. The assumption that a group that was seemingly this accomplished could come from a country with so many problems, was the primary source of the skepticism.

And if you think about it, they are right, I mean, if we are so smart, accomplished, brilliant and rich, how come we have not grasped simple common social governance yet? To think of it another way, Come on! How difficult could it be if uneducated and lower income Americans can do it. And the French too!

OK, I'll admit that was an intentionally baiting question, but you have to know us to understand us, so step 1 was the need for hard data.

So, I looked and looked to find any credible survey of the Iranian community. I could find no evidence of a scientific survey. The best I could find was an old outdated mathematical projection that some MIT students did as a hobby math project (no brainer for MIT Iranians!), based on the 2000 US Census. The problem that I found with the MIT Survey was that the US census did not ask anyone if they were Iranian! Iranian was not a recognized ethnic group on the 2000 census. Also, even if it was, the dubious likelihood that an Iranian would answer this question willingly, given our "situation" was not very high. And in surveys, if there is the slightest chance for any bias to be introduced into a survey, the results of the survey become suspect. Scientifically worse, they are invalid.

So the MIT survey while exactly what we needed was unfortunately only a mathematical prediction based on data that did not ask the simplest question, "Are You Iranian?"

As I continued my search, I spoke about the problem to the various groups and orgs I was volunteering with at the time, and more and more people started saying, "Why don't we do one ourselves?"

So we did. We found an Iranian company with an excellent reputation (URC Inc.) that did the customer satisfaction surveys for companies like Microsoft, Siemens, eBay, to conduct the survey. Next I gathered a group of 10 organizations across the US, to help get the word out via their email lists and general community outreach. Additionally, we used the largest online gathering of Iranians, namely this site, to get the word out and get as many Iranians as possible to take the survey. A good survey is one in which you are certain that the audience taking the survey is as close to the target audience you want. Since we were after Iranians, we knew that using community groups and the largest online site was a pretty damn good sampling. There was little or no chance that a non-Iranian would take our survey.

The survey was an online survey, and there was some concern that this might exclude those Iranians who did not have internet access. But we weren't choosers, or that is to say we were well qualified beggars. The other concern was the validity of an online survey. Just ask any scientist though and they'll tell you that in this day and age the difference between the answers given on a written survey versus an online one are entirely negligible.

Additionally you cannot ask any kind of sensitive questions, such as ethnicity, or religious preference, or any question that could intimidate the taker, and thus introduce bias into the sample. This is one of the most common mistakes that other surveys I have seen, have made. I know it's a burning question, but things like ethnicity and religious background, when they could possibly have discriminatory implications of any kind, introduce bias into the survey, and if you have a survey that a group might be afraid to take, your results are considered scientifically invalid.

So off we went.

The other thing about a survey, is to conduct it as quickly as possible. The idea is to take as sharp a snapshot of the target group as possible. So we set our timeframe as 2 weeks. In that time we gathered over 5,000 responses. Almost all of them were correctly filled out (no gaps or missed questions). We knew we had a good relevant sample. It is important to know that in order to project results for a group, you do not need to actually contact every single member of the group. Plus, we were not trying to count Iranians. Just survey them. So 5,000 responses was more than enough, and according to the scientists 5,000 results more than accurately represented the 750,000 or 4 million Iranians in the US, depending on how many you believe we are.

This became the data I then used to produce the 2004 Iranian-American Survey (click to view [3]), a report that outlined the results of the survey, attempted to interpret them a bit, and in order to give us the proof we needed, compared us to the equivalent census results taken from all Americans. As expected, in almost all areas, Iranians exceeded the American result by far.

I am not certain how Zogby has managed to successfully identify me as an Iranian and collect my number and those of other representative Iranians from their phone numbers, also I am still not sure Iranians would still be willing to give out information easily and freely over the phone as they did from a less personal and imposing online survey, and to be honest, all of this makes me a bit nervous, the current national security listening policy not withstanding, but I largely welcome this recent survey by PAAIA, and over the next few days I look forward to reviewing and comparing the results to the survey we conducted in 2004. Hopefully to see an even higher level of accomplishment for Iranians since 2004.

You can download the PAAIA survey and compare it to the 2004 Iranian-American Survey here [4].