Public attitudes to the death penalty in Japan


Access to data


Micro-data from the government surveys are not made public, making secondary analysis impossible. Access to data is restricted to aggregated descriptive statistics in the form of government reports.82 Taking into consideration the existence of two data archives in Japan – Social Science Japan Data Archive and Japanese Data Archive – there is no reason why the Japanese government cannot use these to make the micro-data of government surveys public. Transparency is important, especially if the government wishes to continue using the result as evidence for legitimising retention.


Findings from three surveys Methodology


Between 2008 and 2010, the author designed and carried out three separate empirical surveys in Japan. Te surveys were designed to measure Japanese public attitudes to the death penalty, using an alternative question to that of the government survey – and hopefully a less biased one – to offer counter-evidence, as well as to evaluate the quality of the government survey question empirically.


Te fieldwork for the first study was a large-scale online panel survey (N=20,769) carried out by a survey company and administered to their panel of respondents83


. Te term “online panel survey” is


used to refer to surveys conducted online and administered to a “panel of respondents registered with a survey company”, rather than an online survey that could be administered to anyone depending on the sampling framework. Users of online panel surveys have expanded in the last few years from private companies mainly conducting market research, to government institutions and academic institutions conducting research (Honda, 2006, p. 32). Te panel – the sampling framework for the survey – was made up of 681,991 people at the time of the survey.84


Te second study used an experimental design that involved drawing two sub-samples from the first survey.85


Te sub-samples were designed to have equal numbers of retentionists, abolitionists


and those who chose the “cannot say” option in the first survey. Only one of the sub-samples was given information about the death penalty. Both sub-samples were then asked to complete the same questionnaire to compare the impact of information. Te survey included seven information items, each followed by a question measuring how informed they already were in relation to the item:


• International movement towards abolition • Relationship between the death penalty and crime rates


82


accessible to academic researchers through the UK Data Archive 83


Due to the low representation of elderly people in the survey company’s panel, a request was made to obtain a sample of male and female aged between 20 and 49. Te resulting sample (N=20,769) was randomly drawn from the panel, stratified by sex and age. Te distribution of sex and age from the resulting sample was compared with the population estimates from the Japanese population survey published by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. Te distribution was very similar but calibration weights were applied nonetheless to the resulting sample to minimise sampling bias. All


84


analyses presented have been conducted using weighted data 85


Subjects were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups (N=542 in each), using a randomised block design. Te sample from the first


survey was split into blocks according to two independent variables (age and sex) and one dependent variable (attitudes to the death penalty) and then randomly allocated within blocks to the experimental and control groups. Tis design maximised comparability between the two groups, in terms not only of sex and age, but also in their attitudes to the death penalty, prior to the experimental intervention


41


Comparison can be made with the UK where, for example, the micro-data from the British Crime survey carried out by the Home Office are made Intage administered the preliminary survey (http://www.intage.co.jp/net/)


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