Asia: What is Important in Life

May 12, 2007 at 3:18 am (Asia, Social, Statistic)

When the question “How is it important in your life” on the subjects like family, friends, leisure time, politics, work, religion and service to others is asked, 4 categorical answers are given: very important, rather important, not very important and not at all important. The graphs shown below here indicated how many percentage of people think it is “very important” and “rather important” on those subjects.

1. Family

People in Indonesia and Philipines top all the countries: 99.0% and 98.6% of them said that family is very important to them. However, it is a surprise to note that the strong Confucius influence country like China, Vietnam, Korea and Singapore has lower percentage of people think that family is very important to them. Why?





2. Friends
Friends, generally are not viewed as important as family. However, about 56.0% of Indonesians think that friend is very important to them, followed by Saudi Arabian (53.2%) and Japanese (48.1%). Only 20.4% and 21.8% of Chinese and Vietnamese respectively think friend is very important in their lives.


3. Leisure time

As many as 43.6% of Japanese think that leisure time is very important in their lives. Other highly industrialised countries like Singaporean (26.4%) and Korean (23.8%) think the same. However, only small minority people in China, Vietnam and Egypt think that leisure time is very important. Busy to earn livinghood i guess?

4. Politics

Apparently, compared to family or friends, politics is not an important aspect of life among Asians. 38.7% of Vietnamese think politics is very important in their lives, but only 10.1% Singaporean and 10.4% Indonesian deem the same.

5. Work

Work, surprisingly, is significant in Asian’s life. Overall, more than 50% of people think work is “very important” in their lives (except Japan and China). The top in the rank goes to Philiphines, 93.4% of them think work is very important, followed by Bangladesh (91.8%) and Indonesia (89.2%). On the other end of spectrum, in rich countries like Japan, Singapore and Korea, relatively smaller percentage of people think work is very important in their lives.

6. Religion

Religion, especially Islam, is very important in countries like Indonesia (98.1%), Egypt (97.3%) and Saudi Arabia (89.0%). China, being a communist country, only 0.66% of her people think religion is very important. Japan, being an industrialised and modern country, has only 7.3% of people think religion is important.

7. Service to others

61.8% of Egyptian think that service to others is very important in life, while only 8.6% of Japanese feel the same. Again, a pattern of strong Confucius influence countries like Korea, China, Singapore and Vietnam are seeing less people think that service to others is very important, whereby the factor of material affluence (or income) is out of question (e.g. Vietnam vs Singapore, poor vs rich). A coincident or what?

Source: World Values Survey
Ref:micpohling.wordpress