Disaggregating Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Data: A Methodological Imperative for Equity-Centered Social Work Science

Persistent ethnoracial inequities continue to challenge social work’s commitments to social justice, evidence-informed practice, and policy. Within this landscape, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPIs) remain among the most systematically misrepresented and statistically obscured populations in US social and health research. This characterization is supported by evidence documenting the routine aggregation of NHPI populations into broader racial categories, particularly Asian American, across federal data systems, administrative datasets, and scholarly research (Asian Americans Advancing Justice, 2025; Office of Management and Budget, 2024). Such practices suppress variability, mask disparities, and introduce systematic bias into population estimates. Although issues of aggregation affect multiple racial and ethnic populations, the case of NHPIs warrants particular attention for three reasons. First, NHPIs are a federally recognized racial category that continues to be routinely collapsed into other groups despite explicit federal standards requiring separate identification. Second, NHPI populations experience distinct historical, political, and structural conditions—including settler colonialism, territorial governance, militarization, and migration shaped by Compact of Free Association agreements—that fundamentally differentiate their exposure to social systems. Third, the relatively small sample sizes of NHPI populations in many datasets make them especially vulnerable to statistical erasure, resulting in consistent underestimation of disparities.