Team:Zamorano/PerceptionMethodology

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Public perception of university students in Honduras about Biotechnology, Synthetic Biology and GMOs



Methodology


In order to do an analysis of the public perception about Synthetic Biology and GMO’s we decided to modify an already done survey by Dr. William K. Hallman from the Department of Human Ecology at the State University of New Jersey “Rutgers”. Dr. Hallman´s survey title is “Public Perceptions of Agricultural Biotechnology: A Survey of New Jersey Residents”. After having his permission, we adapted the survey to the Honduran context and modified certain questions.




The survey was launched online at SurveyMonkey.com and was then distributed by email and social network pages to random selected students studying at Zamorano University, Catholic Honduran University (UNICAH), Central American Technological University (UNITEC), National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) and “another” option was also available for people studying in another university that may have received the survey. As the size of the analyzed population was not big enough to differentiate each university´s group, the team decided to analyze only two groups; “Zamorano students” and “other universities”.

The population aimed by the survey were several university students in Honduras from different majors; economy, business, agronomy, agroindustry, biology, pure sciences, among others. Their age range went from 16 years old to 26 and older.

Results were finally analyzed with the predictive analytics software SPSS in order to find significant differences between both groups and correlations among different questions looking for the causes of their level of approval about biotechnology practices and GMO’s. These results were used for the development of the risk analysis tool and the planning of the educational model we designed for Latin America’s universities aiming at the main topics we found necessary for the people in order to develop their own criteria about Synthetic Biology based upon reliable information.