2015 Volume 4 Issue 1 Pages 17-29
Lakes are natural water reservoir to store inland waters. It was suggested that the difficulty in improvement of lake environment was due possibly to a decline of social concern on lake water use and environment. We try the quantitative study of social concern. A content analysis was applied to the newspaper articles related to lake utilization and lake environment at three lake basins (Lakes Kasumigaura, Biwa and Suwa) in 1997, 2012, 2007 and 2012. First, the newspaper articles which containnned the names of the lakes but show no relevance to lake utilization and lake environment were excluded from the analysis. Second, the newspaper articles was decomposed into words (morphological analysis) then the contents of the articles were analyzed through characterizing them using several categories of both lake utilization and lake environment. The results show that the number of newspaper articles basically decreased during the last two decades accompanied by the changes in the content. Words used in the articles were also changed. There were also articles containing the categoryes other than water quality such as lake fishery, sightseeing, ecosystem and atmosphere. Thus, results suggested that social concern for these topics was sometimes important than that for water quality depending on lake and year. The produced bank of the words for choosing and characterrizing the newspaper articles would be useful for future analysis on other lakes and years to identify issues related to lake utilization and lake environment.
