Team:BGU Israel/Survey

From 2013.igem.org

Revision as of 20:01, 29 September 2013 by Neta.weiss (Talk | contribs)

BGU_Israel

Survey Understanding Public's Opinion

    There has never been a large-scale survey in Israel about synthetic biology and genetic engineering. Therefore, our first step was to undertake a massive public opinion survey to learn about the current state of public opinion, and hopefully understand the roots of opposition to synthetic biology.

    In the past few years, a number of public opinion surveys have been undertaken in various countries regarding new biological technologies, including synthetic biology. We based our survey on the strong, high-quality foundations of past efforts from across the world, including studies done in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and New Zealand.

    Two questions must be asked before presenting the questionnaire and the results: Why bother conducting such a survey? And what did we intend to learn from it?

    We wanted to canvass Israeli public opinion about synthetic biology because first of all, we couldn’t find any similar survey done in the past in Israel, and secondly, scientific progress tends to outpace public perception. We believe synthetic biology holds great potential for ecological, medical, and other projects, but nothing can be implemented without public support. For that to happen, we first need to understand how much people know about genetic engineering and synthetic biology, and what their concerns and thoughts are.

    *Note: as the term "synthetic biology" is not very common, we added the term "genetic engineering" which is much more familiar, even though they are not completely equivalent.

    The Questionnaire


    Ten questions were translated to Hebrew from the surveys mentioned above, some slightly modified to be more comprehensive and generic. In addition, one question was added that relates to our project specifically. The personal details asked were minimal, to make the survey as convenient and fluent as possible, and included: age, gender, religion & education.

    Read the full survey in English.



    Methods of distribution


    The questionnaire was distributed from September 8th to September 24th, 2013, in the following ways:

    1. 120 responses.
    2. 50 responses.
    3. Facebook link, distributed by team members and posted on several Israeli forums. => 711 responses. 13 out of them belong to "green" forums and are marked seperatly.

    Altogether we collected 1115 responses for our survey, from a variety of age groups and backgrounds, 77 of which were excluded due to many missing answers.

    Do the responders accurately represent Israeli society? Unfortunately, no. We tried to reach a diverse sample of Israelis but as seen above, most responders were ones that reached the link via Facebook, which is skewed to be a younger and more technologically savvy population. Also, because we are all students and because we used science forums to promote the survey, the percentage of people with an academic background or advanced degrees that answered our survey is higher than in general population.

    Because the results of this survey are not necessarily representative, we focused on directed analysis of the groups that we do feel that our results represent, rather than generalizations about all of Israeli society. We also excluded the responses from the science forum links for some of the analyses. For a fuller picture, we recommend generating an even larger survey using survey companies that have better access to a more representative sample of the public.



    Results & Analysis


    Our hypothesis is that the more people hear and learn about the world of genetic engineering and synthetic biology, the less they are concerned about it. The encounters with this field could be through an article in a newspaper, studying about it in school, talking about it with friends, watching a video on Youtube, etc. In our eyes, the negative public perception and uncertainty about biological developments has a lot to do with a lack of familiarity with the subject and a lack of participation in public discourse about it.

    We present below the results most relevant to our hypothesis. The full report can be found here and contains many interesting graphs, which illustrate the differences between our religious responders to our secular ones, gender differences in attitudes, and more.



    1. Have you ever heard of synthetic biology?



    &npsp;&npsp;&npsp;&npsp;&npsp;



    References
    [1] [Hart Research Associates . “Awareness & Impressions of Synthetic Biology– a Report of Findings”. September, 2010. (accessed August 2013).   Click here  to view the full research.
    [2] Lock, Roger; Miles, Colin. “Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering: Students' Knowledge and Attitudes”. 1993.(accessed August 2013).   Click here  to view the full research.
    [3] Macer, Darryl; Chen Ng; Mary Ann. “Changing Attitudes to Biotechnology in Japan”. September, 2000. (accessed August 2013).  Click here   to view the full research.
    [4] Royal Commission on Genetic Modification, New Zealand . “Analysis of Public Opinion Survey”. 2002.(accessed August 2013).  Click here  to view the full research.


Retrieved from "http://2013.igem.org/Team:BGU_Israel/Survey"