The Townsend Thai project aims at bridging academic research and policy creation by bringing together one of the most detailed and longest running panel datasets in the developing world collected by the Thai Family Research Project and secondary data archived by the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce (UTCC) for researchers at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), the University of Chicago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and other distinguished universities around the world.

 

     When beginning the Townsend Thai project, the Principal Investigator, Dr. Robert Townsend, sought to understand what risks households in a typical village encounter. Particularly, he wanted to examine whether adverse events, or shocks, that households experience were aggregate or idiosyncratic. This brought about the creation of what was originally intended to be one large survey of rural Thailand in 1997, but has continued so far.
    

     The initial plan was to evaluate villages in similar environments with and without formal institutions by using a combination of annual household, institutional, and key important surveys. In August 1998, the project incorporated an extremely detailed monthly survey to gather data, in combination with other environmental data. This continuous data collection project, the Townsend Thai data, has been generously supported over the past by the National Institute of Child health and Human Development (NICHD), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Ford Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Opinion Research Center (NORC).

     Summary of Literatures, Documents and Papers utilizing Townsend Thai Project data will be published through UC-UTCC Data Depository.