CHANGES OF SOCIAL NORMS AND INFLUENCES OF MEDIA FRAMES IN JAPANESE SOCIETY

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The purpose of this study was to research on changes of social norms in Japanese society and to explore the influence of media frames on social norms. Media frames which mass media has used for their constructing meanings of news often affect people's consciousness, and people's consciousness sometimes changes social norms or forms new ones.In 2000, to clarify the change of media frames on social norms, I analyzed the contents of editorial articles on Coming-of-Age Day and personal advice columns in major Japanese newspapers. The analysis of editorial articles on Coming-of-Age Day traces the change of "adult" concepts from 1950's to 1990's. Through the content analysis of personal advice columns in 1969, 79, 89, and 99, it was found that problems treated in those columns became more personal and psychological, and recent age.The next year I conducted a social survey to research the change of various aspects of social norms. The results show that traditional norms were kept by people beyond my expectation. However the norms in family and in sexual relationships changed deeply, and there were big differences between the age and the young, and between men and women. Opinions of the young were ambiguous and were not consistent. Unfortunately we could not verify the influence of media frames on people's consciousness about social norms directly. Although family and school education may work to keep traditional norms, they do not work to form new norms. Then, I will assume that there remains a possible of the influence of media frames.