The Study on the Cultural, Psychological, and Social Effects of the Revolution in Information Technology(IT)

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This research took up a new kind of inequality, the digital divide in an information society. Our purpose is to clarify the cultural, psychological, and social effects of the revolution of information technology (IT)As for cultural aspects, we discussed about the dynamic states of sense of value in an information society. As for social aspects, we focused on the change of lifestyle or way of communication, and analyzed the digital divide from the viewpoint of inequalities among social stratifications such as gender, age, region, education, job and income. As for psychological aspects, we placed importance on the effects of IT use on the relationship between work and personality, the inter-relationship among self-direction, intellectual flexibility, and authoritarianism, and social consciousness in the highly-sophisticated information society.To examine the issues as noted above, we conducted a series of national surveys, The Japan Survey on Information Society(JIS). Three surveys have been conducted thus far, Survey 1 (JIS 2001) in 2001, Survey 2 (JIS 2002) in 2002 and Survey 3 (JIS 2004) in 2004. The samples of the JIS surveys are men and women aged 20 to 89 (20 to 79 for JIS2004). The sampling method used is multi-stage stratified random sampling. The survey method used for JIS2002 is a face-to-face interview method. In the cases of JIS2001 and JIS2004, we used both a face-to-face interview method and self-administered questionnaire. The sample size are 2,000 (1,500 for JIS2001). The completion ratio is 67.4% for JIS2001, 62.8% for JIS2002 and 64.7% for JIS2004.In order to report JIS surveys and their findings, we published "The Interim Report of The Japan Survey on Information Society." Our database of social research, Social Research Database on Questionnaire(SRDQ), also offers the information and the data of JIS surveys on the web site (http://srdq.osaka-u.ac.jp).