Next Generation Thailand: Nationwide Youth Research for the British Council
- Industry
- International development / Youth & social policy
- Duration
- 2025 - 2026
- Client
- British Council
The Business Issue
Next Generation is the British Council’s global research series on young people’s aspirations, values and civic participation, delivered in more than 20 countries. Iconic Research led the Thailand study and co-authored the report, published by the British Council in August 2026 and credited to Hultin, F. K., Khan, A., Khambunma, P., and Langprasert, S., released under a Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0 licence in English and Thai.
Thailand’s young people face economic insecurity, unequal access to opportunity and institutional barriers, while showing high ambition and a strong desire to contribute. The British Council needed evidence that could hold both realities at once: representative enough to inform national policy, qualitatively deep enough to explain the barriers rather than only count them, and shaped by young people themselves so the conclusions reflected their priorities rather than an institution’s assumptions about them.
The Techniques
- Our Approach
The study was built in layers, each answering a different question.
A nationwide survey of 2,000 young people aged 18–30 provided the representative base, covering all regions of Thailand, diverse genders, and young people with disabilities. This produced the statistical findings on values, aspirations, education, employment, entrepreneurship, civic engagement and climate attitudes.
Key informant interviews with leaders across education, civil society and the public sector added institutional perspective on the constraints young people face and where policy could move.
Focus group discussions with young people explored the reasoning beneath the survey findings — why financial security ranks above marriage, what “not being heard” means in practice, and what stops an aspiring entrepreneur from starting.
A Youth Task Force involved young people directly in analysing the evidence and shaping the recommendations, so that the report’s conclusions were tested against the people they describe.
Stakeholder validation workshops brought together representatives from academia, civil society, media, government, international organisations and youth-led initiatives to review the findings before publication.
The result is a study whose recommendations were grounded in the experiences of young people across Thailand and validated by the institutions expected to act on them.
The Results
Key findings. The report’s central finding is what the British Council names the agency gap: Thai young people are ambitious, optimistic and ready to contribute, yet feel structurally excluded from the decisions that shape their lives, as reported by The Nation.
The numbers make the gap concrete. 84% are optimistic about their future and 68% want to start a business within five years — yet only 25% feel the education system prepared them for work, half say they cannot access the capital to start, and 51% feel their voices on national issues are rarely or never heard. 83% are willing to take or already taking climate action.
The report closes with eight policy recommendations, developed with the Youth Task Force, spanning youth participation in policymaking, education reform, provincial opportunity, civic pathways and Thailand’s soft-power strategy.
Outcome. The report was launched in three cities — Bangkok on 27 August 2026, then Chiang Rai and Khon Kaen — with Piyatida Khambunma, Founder and Research Lead at Iconic Research, presenting the key findings alongside British Council Thailand’s Country Director and the British Council’s Senior Justice and Youth Engagement Adviser. The British Council has stated it will use the findings as the starting point for partnerships across English language, education, the arts and the creative industries, creating spaces for young people to shape their own futures. The launch was covered by The Nation and Amarin TV.
For Iconic Research, the study demonstrates public and social research delivered to the standard of a global research series and published under an open licence for anyone to use.
The full report is free to download from the British Council in English and Thai.
