On the Quantitative Analysis of the Structure of Village Communities

Abstract

The social change caused by the drastic change of the industrial structure in Japan from the latter half of 1960's to the first half of 1970's has brought local communities to a crisis. The change has been explained by the debate whether the structure of village communities has already collapsed or still remained. In this situation, it is important to intensively describe the present conditions of local communities and their subtle changes. It is also necessary to compare the community structures based on the standardized data and to analyze quantitatively the community structures at the regional and nationwide levels, in order to establish a common and objective scale.Nishida and I made use of “the agricultural community cards” (mainly of 1970) of the World census about the Agriculture and Forestry. We drew a 1500 random sample out of one hundred and forty-two thousand local communities. We calculated a mean and a variance, and using the method of the Principal Component Analysis (one of the multivariate analyses), found four components common to all the local communities. We have set up the “nationwide criterion” to easily calculate the component scores of a local community. We have also proposed the “regional criterion”. As our case study, we have employed the communities in Tsushima islands of Nagasaki prefecture.