世論 What Japan Thinks

The title sounds perhaps as if Sunday has come a day early to the blog, but that was the best title I could think of for this recent survey by iBridge Research Plus and reported on by japan.internet.com into online shopping failures.

Demographics

On the 30th of March 2009 300 female members of the iBridge online monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 20.3% of the sample were in their twenties, 41.0% in their thirties, 27.7% in their forties, 9.7% in their fifties, and 1.3% in their sixties.

The find of failure this survey was interested in was goods not quite matching the description on the page or accidentally buying the wrong thing, etc, not technical failures or fraud. Don’t ask me why almost one in five of the sample aren’t sure whether or not they failed!
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Although I was at a loss to explain why a previous survey was young women only, it is quite obvious why this survey from iBridge Research Plus, reported on by japan.internet.com, on online shopping payment methods focused on the fairer sex.

Demographics

On the 16th of March 2009 300 female members of the iBridge research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 21.3% of the sample were in their twenties, 41.7% in their thirties, 25.7% in their forties, 9.0% in their fifties, and 2.3% in their sixties.

One of the more popular payment methods in the west is surely PayPal, so from my point of view the omission is glaring. Yahoo! Wallet is available in the USA also, and it seems to be mostly a proxy for your own credit card, so your credit card information is held only by Yahoo!, not the merchants and shops that support Yahoo! Wallet, so it should be more secure.
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Why this survey focused only on the young woman demographic is a bit of mystery to me, but that’s what iBridge Research Plus did in this survey reported on by japan.internet.com into web email.

Demographics

On the 9th of March 2009 300 female members of the iBridge research monitor group completed an internet-based questionnaire. 21.3% of the sample were in their twenties, 46.3% in their thirties, and 32.3% in their forties.

With some of the services described below, the email address comes as part of a package – au one Mail is an external mailbox for mobile phones, and to create a livedoor blog you need to create a livedoor email address, a process I have done myself, but both the blog and mailbox lie unused.
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I’m not sure if the phrasing in the story title is familiar to many, but in the UK where Harlequin novels are called Mills and Boon, the popular generic term for such style of romantic novels is the bodice-ripper. Anyway, that title serves to give away the results of a survey conducted by iBridge Research Plus and reported on by japan.internet.com into mobile phone novels.

Demographics

On the 2nd of March 2008 300 female members of the Research Plus monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 25.0% of the sample were in their twenties, 49.0% in their thirties, and 26.0% in their forties.

I’ve never read a mobile phone novel or even a novel on a mobile phone for that matter, although when I last translated a similar survey I mentioned that there are many readers for reading books on most types of mobiles, but like many other things I talk about I’ve never quite had time to try it out!
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As quite often happens, this report published by japan.internet.com regarding a survey conducted by iBridge Research Plus into women and home computers was interesting yet frustrating in the incompleteness of the data.

Demographics

On the 23rd of February 2009 300 female members of the iBridge Research Plus monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 23.3% of the sample were in their twenties, 34.7% in their thirties, 29.3% in their forties, 9.6% in their fifties, and 3.0% in their sixties.

The first frustration is that there is no domestic status described, as it would be interesting to see how they share computers with their husbands, children, parents or flatmates.

A second frustration is no information regarding whether wives get hand-me-downs from their husbands, or if their own PC was bought new, and if so, how much input did they themselves have in the decision.

We have a shared PC at home, running Vista with my wife’s account set to Japanese, mine to English, which does work rather well. We’ve no money for a computer each, but if we did I’d probably get a nice wee Netbook for myself.
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With the economy tanking, and with many firms announcing pay freezes if not cuts, this survey conducted by iBridge Research Plus and reported on by japan.internet.com into wives and foreign exchange is rather timely.

Demographics

On the 2nd of February 2009 300 married women from the iBridge monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 7.3% of the sample were in their twenties, 44.3% in their thirties, 32.0% in their forties, 13.0% in their fifties, and 3.3% in their sixties.

With perfect timing the Financial Times has a long but worth reading article on female Japanese foreign exchange investors.

I’d love to know more about the 96.4% who didn’t find full time jobs. Were they looking? How many were already employed?
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I remember last time I was looking for an electronic book survey two came along at once, and this time too I have seen a couple in quick succession, so I’ll again double them up. Both surveys were reported on by japan.internet.com, and the first was on electronic books and conducted by iBridge Research Plus, and the second on book purchasing online and conducted by Marsh Inc.

Demographics

For the iBridge survey, between the 30th of October and the 1st of November 2008 300 members of the iBridge monitor panel completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 51.3% of the sample were female, 16.0% in their twenties, 39.7% in their thirties, 27.3% in their forties, 11.3% in their fifties, and 5.7% aged sixty or older. For the Marsh survey, between the 31st of October and the 4th of November 2008 300 members of the Marsh monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 50.0% of the sample were male, 20.0% in their twenties, 20.0% in their thirties, 20.0% in their forties, 20.0% in their fifties, and 20.0% aged sixty or older.

In Q2 from iBridge, 青空文庫, Aozora Bunko, Blue Sky Library, is a great place to find stuff to read, although the formatting could do with some work to be more friendly to modern browsers that can display readings of kanji over the characters rather than inline after them. However, this is a list of viewers for Aozora Bunko. The last book I read from there was Kenji Miyazawa’s Night on the Galactic Railroad, which is a nice short story for intermediate-level students. I also don’t understand why they restricted the question to PC users, since as can be seen from the viewer page, there are suitable readers for almost everything including an iPhone. Do any of my iPhone using readers want to do a road test of these packages?
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