Getting the weather forecast in Japan
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A recent survey conducted by goo Research and reported on by japan.internet.com looked at how Japanese keep track of all five (or six, depending on what you count) of the four seasons via the weather forecast.
Demographics
Between the 1st and 3rd of October 2008 1,059 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.0% of the sample were male, 16.8% in their teens, 17.8% in their twenties, 21.7% in their thirties, 15.7% in their forties, 16.0% in their fifties, and 12.0% aged sixty or older.
Just a couple of days ago I leafed through a bilingual book on questions on everyday things in Japan, with one of the questions being how the percentage of rain falling is calculated. Bascially, for the time period given it is the chance of more than 1 millimetre of rain falling within a single one hour period. There is no implication of how heavy the rain will be barring the 1 millimetre, however.
Research results
Q1: How do you look up the weather forecast? (Sample size=1,059, multiple answer)
Votes Percentage Television program 935 88.3% Computer-based portal site 614 58.0% Computer-based free weather site 435 41.1% Newspaper 389 36.7% Mobile phone weather site 277 26.2% Mobile phone desktop weather display 214 20.2% Television data broadcast 189 17.8% Radio 113 10.7% Telephone 177 weather forecast service 46 4.3% Computer-based paid weather site 9 0.8% Other 9 0.8% Don’t look at weather forecasts (to end of survey) 8 0.8% Now, eliminating the 8 people who don’t check the weather forecast, the remaining 1,051 were asked the following questions.
Q2: How accurate do you think the weather forecast is? (Sample size=1,051)
100% accurate 0.3% 80% to 90% accurate 26.6% 60% to 70% accurate 58.8% 40% to 50% accurate 12.8% 20% to 30% accurate 1.5% 10% or less accurate 0.0% Q3: In the last year, how has the weather forecast accuracy changed? (Sample size=1,051)
Improved 8.0% Improved a little 28.9% Don’t feel it’s changed 52.5% Got a little worse 8.6% Got worse 2.0%
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