The survey targeted students at universities across Southeast Asia. We built on the methods and survey instrument employed in the 2007 ASEAN Awareness Survey. In 2007, we sampled students at one leading, “flagship” university in each ASEAN nation. For the 2014 survey, we returned to the same primary universities and also selected additional universities in six out of the ten countries, to further test the validity of our results and to probe for within-nation variation in those nations. At each university, the questionnaire was administered in the main language of instruction for that university. For simplicity, we refer to the universities involved in both the previous survey and the current survey as the “primary universities” and the additional universities in the current survey as “additional universities”.

The primary universities were originally selected because they represented the top, public universities in each nation. Therefore the current students at those universities could be expected to represent a sample of future leaders and members of the nations’ professional classes and to be important thought-leaders of the coming generation. While their views may not necessarily be nationally representative in a statistical sense — for instance, they may vary from older generations or from less educated members of the general population — nevertheless, we can expect that their views will matter to the future of how their individual nations and the region as a whole respond to and build on the ASEAN framework in coming decades.

In 2014, we were able to successfully replicate the 2007 survey at primary universities in nine of the ten ASEAN member states, at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (Brunei), Royal University of Phnom Penh (Cambodia), Universitas Indonesia, Depok Campus (Indonesia), National University of Laos (Lao PDR), University of Malaya (Malaysia), University of the Philippines Diliman (the Philippines), National University of Singapore (Singapore), Chulalongkorn University (Thailand), and Vietnam National University, Hanoi (Vietnam). In all cases, where we refer, for purposes of brevity, to data from a nation in cross-national comparisons, we are referring to the data from the primary universities amongst our samples.