| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,600,000、Indirect Cost: ¥300,000)
Fiscal Year 2007: ¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000、Indirect Cost: ¥300,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥2,600,000 (Direct Cost: ¥2,600,000)
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| Research Abstract |
I have noticed for sometime in Japan that there is a strong sense of uneasiness in using political means to solve personal or social problems, among Japanese citizens. They just do not want to get involved with anything political. And, this sense of "retreatedness" is working as a inhibiting force against political activeness.
The present study attempted to identify sources for such "retreatedness" by listening to a personal history of ordinary voters. The assumption was that their social and political past had influenced their present attitude toward political matters.
It was not easy, however, to "find" an individual who were willing to speak about his/her personal "history" to a total stranger (me). I used a combination of a telephone interview and a mail questionnaire to "reach" to such respondents. The telephone interview, first, identified some 50 individuals who were willing to respond to the mail questionnaire. Then, among those who returned the questionnaire, I identified 6 candidates for a personal interview. The method proved to be an efficient way to "reach" such individuals while maintaining sufficient randomness in the selection process.
Two important implications I could draw from the personal interviews include: First, not only the level of uneasiness in getting involved with political matters varies among individuals, but also the nature of "retreatedness" differs to a great extent among them. No individuals felt "retreated" in the same manner. Second, although the level of political sophistication varies among my interviewees, they all have their own "grammars" to understand the political world, and they use the same "grammars" to deal with daily matters: They were all internally consistent.
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