人口学リテラシー尺度の開発と分析

Abstract

This article presents the concept of "demographic literacy" as part of civic literacy, and attempts to develop a psychological scale to assess it. A sample of 569 participants (284 men and 285 women, mean age 44.35 years) from all parts of Japan answered two types of subscale using the Internet. One subscale consisted of knowledge problems in which 23 questions were asked about participants' knowledge of demographic facts and principles. The mean number of correct answers was 12.15. The other subscale consisted of attitude questions asking participants' agreement or otherwise about the role of the Japanese government in raising marriage and birth rates, in slowing down urbanization in Japan, and so on. Analyses of gender and age differences revealed that participants in their forties and sixties were in favor of governmental interventions and that those who favored governmental intervention tended to achieve lower scores in the knowledge questions.