世論 What Japan Thinks

Earlier this month iShare surveyed members of their CLUB BBQ service to find out mainly about people’s attitude to children and mobiles, but there were also additional questions regarding people’s partners and mobiles. This report, however, only featured three results, but I’d love to get hold of the full set of results so I could translate it! They got 880 replies to their private internet-based survey, with 73% of the sample size being male. The ages of the respondents were between 30 and 50.

It may be instructive to cross-reference these results with the other survey I have just presented on the same subject.

Q1: From what age should children start to carry mobile phones? (Sample size=880)

High school (15 to 18 years old)	26.1%
Middle school (12 to 15 years old)	16.9%
Early primary school (6 to 8 years old)	14.0%
Late primary school (10 to 12 years old)	11.3%
University	9.8%
Middle primary school (8 to 10 years old)	8%
Once they start working	5%
Nursery school (Under 6 years old)	4%
Mobile phones are not needed	3%
Other	2%

Q2: If you gave your children a mobile phone to carry, what sort of feature is most needed? (Sample size=880)

GPS or other locating services	38.3%
Emergency call feature	33.8%
Anti-crime buzzer	24.6%
Other	2%
None	0.5%

When asked for all of their opinions about features for a child-targetted anti-crime mobile phones, at 42% the most popular view was that talk and internet time limiting features should be present. Next, at 38% was GPS location features, and at 20% was time-of-day-based limitations. How exactly these results relate to Q2 above is not too clear.

Q3: Would you like to know by using GPS where your partner is currently?

Don’t want to know	60.6%
Want to know	24.4%
No partner	15.0%

When asked if they’d like to make their partner carry a GPS-based phone (a subtlely different question to Q3 above), 30% thought they would. On the other hand, only 15% wanted to know the contents of their partner’s mail or phone conversations. When asked for their reasons for not wanting to know the above, popular reasons included not wanting to breach privacy, worrying it looked like stalking, and (not surprisingly, I think) that they’d be happier not knowing.