Know your enemy; improving public awareness of biosciences

• Summary
• Advantages and Limitations

Description of the advantages and limitations

Online survey / public perception analysis:

Advantages

• An online survey allows the investigator to collect primary information from a broader audience than physical surveys. The survey was not limited by a physical location. Any university student that had access to internet was able to perform this risk analysis. The fact that the survey was online, allowed a wider spread of the survey.

• An online survey only cost is the paid membership, which allows the investigator to ask more than ten questions. All other costs, like transportation and pollsters’ wages, are not incurred.

• Information is stored in an online database that facilitates the tabulation and analysis method. Compared to physical surveys, the process of transcribing information from the physical polls to the computer is skipped.

• A public perception analysis allowed us to use the data gathered to determine significant statistical differences between the studied groups.

Limitations

• The lack of a personal contact increased the number of incomplete surveys.

• Time required for completing the surveys proved was 10 minutes approximately.

How did we manage these limitations?

Having one of the team members to be from the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) played an essential role for the public perception analysis. He contacted more than 500 undergraduate students from different majors of his and other universities. In Zamorano, being a boarding university where all of its students live inside of its campus, the team was able to use the internal email, social media and visited the classrooms to invite the students to fill out the survey. After one month of gathering information, almost 360 surveys were completed from which 301 were filled out correctly.