世論 What Japan Thinks

Following on from a recent survey regarding phone email handedness and voice earedness, japan.internet.com in conjunction with JR Tokai Express Research carried out a survey on which hand people usually use with their mouse. They surveyed 330 working people by means of an internet questionnaire. 76.7% of the sample was male, with 15.8% in their twenties, 45.8% in their thirties, 30.3% in their forties, 7.6% in their fifties, and just 0.6% (two people) over the age of sixty.

In the first question you may notice a rather high percentage of lefties who got converted to right-handedness. This treatment of sinister characters is not unique to Japan, but it does perhaps appear to be rather strong within schools, looking at the figures here. Also, since most of the survey here is in their thirties, we are only seeing a snapshot of schooling 20 years ago or so; searching the web reveals that there is an oft-quoted survey that says only 0.7% of Japanese schoolchildren are left-handed, but I could not discover details of what the original survey was or when it was conducted.

Q1: Are you left-handed or right-handed? (Sample size=330)

Originally left-handed, but school or parents “corrected” me	4.8%
Ambidextrous (to Q2)	2.1%
Always right-handed	87.0%
Always left-handed	6.1%

Q2: Currently, with which hand do you use your mouse? (Sample size=43, ambidextrous users)

Left hand	7%
Right hand	84%
Both hands (to Q3)	9%
Use other pointing device	0%

Q3: Do you know that by using the control panel or other software you can change a mouse to left-handed use? (Sample size=36, ambidextrous right-hand mousers)

Yes	39%
No	61%

japan.internet.com, in conjunction with a new-to-me company Cross Marketing Inc (ugh, Flash-based survey reports!), performed a survey of 300 mobile phone users (exactly 50:50 male and female) at the start of this month to find out what habits they had regarding mobile phones. 17.3% of the respondents were in their teens (in fact, aged 18 or 19 only), and each of the four decades of age from twenties to fifties were represented by 20.7% of the sample size.

I previously presented another survey that looked at the use of extra features of a mobile phone, but the percentages are quite different between the two. More investigation may be needed to discover why this discrepency has occured, although I wonder if the sample selection method is the problem. The earlier survey was a self-selecting one that would tend to attract heavy users, I suspect, but for this one, although the respondent selection method is not described, given the small survey size and the balanced age grouping, I suspect there is a much more rigourous selection process.
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