RIECE Panel Data (RPD)

RIECE Panel Data (RPD) is a part of the Thailand Childhood Longitudinal Survey (TCLS), which is a result of a close collaboration between the Research Institute for Policy Evaluation and Design (RIPED) at the University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce and the Equitable Education Fund (EEF). RPD is a comprehensive annual panel dataset from rural Thailand. The survey started in June 2016, targeting children one to four years old in Mahasarakham and Kalasin provinces, where the RIECE Thailand project started. Therefore, it is called “RIECE Panel Data (RPD).”

Structure of the Questionnaire
The questionnaire (QN) comprises four main parts: household QN, children QN, child-development QN, and school QN.

1. Household QN was adapted from the Annual Townsend Thai Data Survey and Thailand Socio-Economic Survey (SES), which collected detailed information about each individual in the household, e.g., jobs, education, age, gender, labor income, occupations, etc. Importantly, this survey asked about each household member’s working time, sleeping time, leisure time, and health problems. The dataset also contains comprehensive household information, e.g., land ownership, assets, expenditures, remittances, income from business, agriculture, livestock, and government assistance. Recently, it elicited caregivers’ risk preferences, time preferences, and social preferences, and assessed other essential skills or characteristics (e.g., IQ, digit span memory, personality traits).

2. Children QN asked for information about parental time investment (e.g., reading, singing, playing, holding, child-rearing time, etc.), parental material investment (ownership of books, jigsaw, Lego, etc.), nutritional intakes (e.g., foods, milks, breastfeeding, etc.). This part of the QN was adapted from several sources, including the Cohort Study of Thai Children, the World Health Organization Quality of Life, the National Educational Panel Study, and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Program. It also collected information about the child’s vaccinations, health checkups, and birth conditions (gestation duration, birth weight, body length at birth) from the mother-child booklet (recorded by health care providers). When the children are ten or older, the survey will interview them directly. This direct interview includes time spent on key activities alone, time spent on key activities with primary caregiver, mother, father, and friends, schooling information, education expectation, and occupation expectation.

3. Child-development QN interviewed primary caregivers regarding cognitive and non-cognitive skills (e.g., literacy, numeracy, social-emotional development, behavior problems index (BPI), etc.). Importantly, the children have been and will be directly assessed regularly using standard instruments, e.g., the Developmental Surveillance and Promotion Manual (DSPM), school readiness, executive functions (EF), the Raven IQ test, economic preferences, personality traits, etc.

4. School QN collected basic information from school directors and teachers. This part of the QN will start once the children are in childcare centers. It includes detailed observations of the children’s classrooms when they were in preschool, kindergarten, and primary school. 

Sampling Framework

The survey covers 23 subdistricts or Tambons of Mahasarakham and Kalasin provinces. Note that Tambon is the smallest official local governmental organization in Thailand. Each Tambon in the survey area consists of 8 to 24 villages. The survey targeted children aged between one and four years old. We began the sampling by asking village health volunteers who lived within the villages to conduct a census to collect data on the number of eligible children in each village.

Each village was categorized into three groups based on the number of eligible children relative to other villages in the same Tambon.
1) Small villages: villages with the number of eligible children below the 30th percentile.
2) Medium villages: villages with the number of eligible children between the 30th and 70th percentile.
3) Large villages: villages with the number of eligible children larger than the 70th percentile.

One small, two medium, and one large village were randomly chosen from each Tambon. Two more small villages were selected from two Tambons, for a total of 94 villages, because the original small villages from these two Tambons had fewer than three eligible children. Our targeted samples were all children aged between one and four years old in the chosen villages. However, some refused or their primary caregivers were unavailable for an interview during the survey period. We also included children aged five or six who lived in the same household as the targeted children, and their primary caregivers were available for interview (41 children). The survey mistakenly included 21 newborns as well. The total number of samples from this group was 1,040 children from 886 households in 94 villages.

In addition, to follow up on the children from the 2015 survey of the RIECE Thailand project, we kept all children from the sample in the 94 villages (327 children), Additionally, we chose the children from the 2015 survey who lived in two or three of the largest remaining villages in each of those 23 Tambons not yet included in the 94 villages drawn above. The last group comprises 299 children from 47 villages (two villages for each Tambon except one with three villages).

To sum up, the RIECE panel sample at the beginning of the 2016 survey consisted of 1,666 children aged between zero and six years old from 23 Tambons (21 Tambons in Mahasarakham province and 2 Tambons in Kalasin province). We have followed the samples annually since 2016 to the present. See the sample size for each survey year in the table below.