General Aims
The Family Transfers Project (FTP) was led by Alex Weinreb and Jere Behrman.
The overall goal of the Family Transfers Project (FTP) was to examine inter- and intra-generational flows of resources (money and time) within the basic family support network and to measure the extent to which those support systems are sensitive to changes in health status among family members (i.e. between adult respondents and their parents, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, and children).
The FTP can be considered a special type of Social Network Project, since it examines the effects on behavior of relations with a predefined universe of family network partners (rather than respondent-defined list of general social networks partners). The FTP sample is a randomly selected sub-sample of respondents who participated in the first wave of the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project (MDICP-1), now the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH).
The FTP is formally affiliated with the Center for Social Research of the University of Malawi in Zomba, Malawi. Alex Weinreb conducted initial field tests in June, 1998, and then led the fieldwork team over a 10 week period between June and August, 1999.
Data Availability
All survey data collected by the Family Transfers Project are available for download free of charge.
Three types of survey data are available for public use. These include:
- cross-sectional, individual-level data for men and women;
- cross-sectional, couple data for husbands and wives, and their parents (parents data description);
- longitudinal, individual-level data for men and women in the FTP linked to their earlier records collected by the first wave of the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project.
Qualitative data collected by Mike Mtika for the Family Transfers Project are also available for download.
Funding
The Family Transfers Project was jointly funded by the Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) of the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania, grant CA45008, and by the Population Aging Research Center (PARC) of the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania, supported by the National Institute of Aging (NIA), grant AG12836.