Social issue surveys

Structurize, visualize and prioritize social issues from multiple perspectives

Survey purpose

RISTEX promotes R&D to resolve social issues by implementing the outputs of research in S&T. However, fields of social issues vary tremendously, from population, environment, economy to more personal issues, and these are interconnected with each other. In addition, recognition and understanding of social issues can vary diversely, depending on various factors such as gender, age, and the region of residence of the person who views it.

The survey results will be utilized to establish the R&D focus areas/programs RISTEX promotes and for extensive utilization by stakeholders in the industry, academia, government, and private sectors.

Survey methods

We first extract keywords of social issues from information sources such as newspapers, publications, policy documents and the Internet. These keywords are then articulated, prioritized and summarized by popularity and importance, and the results are represented in a visual map. In the past, the surveys were conducted mainly by discussions with specialists, but to cover a wider range of social issues and to increase the accuracy of the survey, we have introduced new methods in recent years, such as text mining for the document content analysis and large-scale opinion surveys using the Internet.

Followings show the basic survey flow:

  1. Select keywords that express social issues
  2. Document search using keywords, classify extracted sentences/articles, visualize and analyze relevance between keywords
  3. Discuss with specialists about keywords and conduct public opinion surveys (survey data segmented by age, occupation, and region)
  4. Visualize and analyze social issues that stand out from keywords of high degrees of attention and importance

Publication of survey results and provision of data

Overviews of recent social issue surveys' results are available on the RISTEX website. In addition, we provide reports and reference data free of charge so that survey results can be used widely. The note on how to use the survey results and contact information can be found in the last page of the report. Please feel free to contact us regarding this matter. We hope the data we provide serves to be useful and appreciate your feedback such as specific requests for future surveys.

Matters to be attended

Please read carefully "How to use this site" for copyrights and disclaimers.
If you would like to obtain the back data, or have comments/inquiries, please contact us by E-mail.
Please ensure to include that it is about the social issue surveys.

E-mail: otoiawasejst.go.jp

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