Midori Aoyagi

Gender Inclusion in Climate Change Adaptation

There is increasing evidence that climate change has an impact on natural disasters, such as flooding, and on agricultural production, both of which have implications for gender issues. In this paper the authors briefly review issues related to gender and poverty and examine the relationships between gender and various indices. They then look at systems of land ownership and inheritance, and discuss an example of job recovery after a disaster through interviews with three female agricultural workers in Japan. The results of the interviews demonstrate the recent empowerment of women in agricultural production and that these women have strong adaptive abilities.

Generalization of Classic Question Order Effects across Cultures

Questionnaire design is routinely guided by classic experiments on question form, wording, and context conducted decades ago. This article explores whether two question order effects (one due to the norm of evenhandedness and the other due to subtraction or perceptual contrast) appear in surveys of probability samples in the United States and 11 other countries (Canada, Denmark, Germany, Iceland, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Taiwan, and the United Kingdom; N = 25,640). Advancing theory of question order effects, we propose necessary conditions for each effect to occur, and found that the effects occurred in the nations where these necessary conditions were met. Surprisingly, the abortion question order effect even appeared in some countries in which the necessary condition was not met, suggesting that the question order effect there (and perhaps elsewhere) was not due to subtraction or perceptual contrast. The question order effects were not moderated by education. The strength of the effect due to the norm of evenhandedness was correlated with various cultural characteristics of the nations. Strong support was observed for the form-resistant correlation hypothesis.

A Case Study on Lifestyles in the Southeast Asian Region from a Sustainable Consumption Point of View

Developing countries continue to struggle to achieve sustainable lifestyles, poverty alleviation, and economic development. Increasing the quantity and quality of consumption generally also means increasing emissions of greenhouse gases and other environmental impacts. The world has recognized the need to decouple economic development (i.e., elevation of the standard of living in developing countries) and resource consumption, but the way to do so remains unclear. The relationship between economic growth and environmental impacts is often discussed in the context of the Kuznets curve, which expresses the development path as an inverted U. One of the ways to decouple that has been discussed in this context is “leap-frogging,” in which developing countries skip (or “compress”) the period of higher environmental impacts in their developmental paths. Structural changes in a country’s industrial sectors are important in this context, including investment in infrastructure, investment in technological innovation, and investment in human resource development (education). The aim of this study was to explore ways to skip the so-called “dirty stages” of development and examine issues related to the “compressed development” concept in the Southeast Asian region, with a particular emphasis on the role of education. To this end, a case study was conducted in Thailand, a relatively newly developed country, in August 2016. A total of 15 individuals were interviewed in Bangkok and Chiang Mai about their current standards of living, social networks, views on education, and future aspirations. The interviewees were from urban and rural areas from five social and economic classes (SECs). Across regional and income categories, (1) people expressed the importance of education in pursuing better lives in the future; (2) people (especially those in the lower SECs) owned more household equipment than we expected, including smart phones, which allowed them access to social networking services and online news; and (3) family was reported as an important safety net, especially for people in lower SECs. In addition, current Thai social, political, and economic conditions influenced people’s perceptions of their “hopes for the future.”