Team:ULB-Brussels/Questionnaire

Questionnaire

Introduction:

The Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) has defined biotechnology as « any technological application that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof, to make or modify products or processes for specific use » (McCullum et al., 2003) (1).

It appears that considerable controversy exists about the use of modern biotechnology in food and agriculture, particularly in the use of genetic engineering and genetically engineered organisms (GEO’s). A good example comes from a French speaking Internet’s user, who claimed that the initials of “Organisme Génétiquement Modifié” (the French for GMO) could mean “Organisme de Génocide Mondial“ (World Genocide Organism). This is the kind of phrases we are finding more and more nowadays. For instance, a study conducted by the Eurobarometer (Noussair, C., Robin, S, & Ruffieux, B., 2001) revealed that 70% of the population thinks that ordinary tomatoes do not contain genes. This observation shows that the scientific knowledge of the general population is sometimes missing, even if information is available everywhere.

Concerning these observations on people’s opinions off GMO’s, we decided to build a survey intended to measure the population’s acceptance of GMO’s. The following section consist mainly in presenting and explaining the methodology, the results and the discussion of our investigation.

Literature review:

From the beginning, GMO’s has been a controversial topic. People do not like that we change life, do not understand the purpose of biotechnology. When we talk with the general public, we can see that the word “genetic” scares most part of them. We could think that it is because people do not have enough knowledge about genetic engineering that they are afraid. But scientists often have difficulties explaining what is the aim of their work, its intended purpose and what the consequences might be. So, there are a lot of misunderstandings and many preconceived ideas.

They are "ideas" specifically because they are common, dominant and are not challenged by the people. Marris, C. (2001) (2) explains some of these ideas and contradicts them. Thus, one might think the public does not understand enough about the science. In fact, the public does not rely on the same knowledge as the scientists to build their ideas of GMO. The public is inspired by associations and institutions that control the potential risks. Then, people think they can only be "for" or "against" GMOs, that they are at first undecided and that their choice is fixed. Also, non-scientists believe, wrongly, that GMO’s are not natural however men cross for thousands of years some organisms without gene modifications (to “conventional breeding”). Then, it is also clear that consumers are more accepting of medical GMO than food GMO. According to the author, this is an assessment of risks and benefits at the consumer level. There are many other ideas, that come in part from the media influence. The media are sometimes meant to be "sensational”. The meetings and exchanges between scientists and activists may also create skewed ideas. Indeed, during the meetings, the militants show positions that can be extreme at times and do not reflect the general opinion. Both factors lead us to believe that the public has misconceptions when it is not necessarily the case. Finally, the public remains largely undecided and still has many questions.

The opinion polls are the most common methods used to identify the views of consumers. However, they are to be interpreted carefully because it is important to remember this is a sample that was interviewed and people must choose between certain categories of answers. Thus, the biological Eurobarometer (Noussair, C. Robin, S., & Ruffieux, B. 2001), produced in 1999, for the European Commission (3), indicates that 53% of Europeans are willing to pay more for a GMO-free food. This reveals a high degree of hostility to the presence of GMO in food products. According to that, the same authors observed behavior in the real life and hostility to GMO was lower than measured by opinion polls. The observation in reality allowed putting consumers in several categories: the indifferent (do not make a distinction between products with GMO and GMO-free products), the boycotters (refusing to pay for products containing GMO), enthusiasts (who pay more for a product containing GMO) and other consumers (with nuanced opinions).

The fear engendered by the issue of GMO can be split in several categories. On the website of Vivagora (4), we find a cue sheet that highlights four domains where synthetic biology can intervene. In each domain, the ethical issues are unique. The first concerns synthesis of genetic elements on a large scale (high volume and low price). This use of biology raises issues of biosafety. We must establish specific rules and remain vigilant. The second area focuses on biomistakes, biohackers and bioterrors risks. GMO cannot be restrained to research commissioned by big pharmaceutical companies. A close watch is necessary; however, one wonders what happens when the information is disclosed to everyone? Can we make synthetic biology in our own garage? (5) The third aims to create artificial organisms totally different from those existing. Thus, they cannot reproduce outside of a lab because they don’t have access to the artificial constituents. The fourth axis points to the fact that there is a risk of "culture clash". Indeed, engineers have a vision in which everything is measured, stable, invariant and standard, while biologists are accustomed to working with the unstable and uncertainty. Synthetic biology is in line with the engineers search for stability and standardization.
All this literature has led us to ask us questions about the information, the workplace and the perception of GMO in its various applications. Thus, we have built and distributed a questionnaire consisting of several parts.

Methodology and Hypothesis:

We build up our survey on Qualtrics Qtrial (http://new.qualtrics.com) and we decided to spread it by e-mail. All of the team members send the survey link to their contacts who did the same with their own contacts and so on.

Our survey was composed of four parts : 9 questions, a short positive text about synthetic biology, the same 9 questions as in part 1 and a data sheet.
The 9 questions were affirmations about people acceptance and tolerance of GMO’s. Here are the affirmations classified as in the survey:

• I think that GMO’s present more advantages than inconvenient.
• I am not afraid of GMO’s.
• To me, GMO’s are useful.
• I don’t buy any products from the organic agriculture.
• I never look at the list of ingredients from the products I buy to make sure that their composition has not been genetically manipulated.
• I do not promote organic products because they are better for the health.
• I am for medical applications developed from GMO’s.
• The idea of eating GMO’s does not disgust me.
• I am for the manipulation of the living.

People could answer to these questions with « completely disagree », « disagree », « neutral », « agree » or « completely agree ».

The second part was composed with this short text:
“Before going further in this survey, we wanted to inform you that since a few years, a new research domain in biology exists. Synthetic biology aims to make biology an engineering science. It combines the principles of biology and engineering to design and to build up new systems, inspired by or based on the living with biological functions that do not exists in nature. Synthetic biology aims to build up “biological machines” in a rational and standardized way. As you can see, these new biological machines developed in laboratory can be viewed as genetically modified organisms (GMO’s). These organisms far from being restricted to one area of food consumption, allow applications as diverse as they are varied (synthetic drugs, environmentally friendly production of hydrogen, bio-fuels, ground depollution,…) to improve our daily life both on ecological and socioeconomic development. 
For example, some bacteria were modified to produce drugs like human insulin (use daily by diabetics) and vaccines (hepatitis B). Similarly, in the food industry, seeds are modified to withstand the weather or insect attacks. Without these genetic changes, some lands would be unusable.
We ask you to take this information into account to answer the second part of the survey.”

The third part was composed by the same questions as in the first part and people had the same possibilities for answering. A few questions were inversed in order to avoid repetition and boringness of the respondents.

The fourth part was made with a data sheet asking the person’s gender, age, profession, degree, activity sector (scientific or not) and information level about GMO’s.

Our first hypothesis was that the answers’ average of the third part was different from the answers’ average of the first part, proving an influence of the informative text on the participants. The second hypothesis was that the people working in a scientific sector would have a more positive opinion about GMO’s than the people working in a non-scientific sector. The third hypothesis concerned the age of the respondents: we postulated that older people would be more opposed to GMO’s compared to younger ones. Finally, we had a fourth hypothesis which was the fact that being informed or not would not influence at all the perception of GMO’s.

Our sample was composed of 185 respondents, including 64 women and 121 men, 49 persons under 29 years, 45 persons between 30 and 51 years, 45 persons between 52 and 59 years and 46 persons who are more than 60 years old (average: 46,85 years). For the sector of activity, 89 people worked in the scientific sector against 96 in non-scientific. We calculated the global information level from our sample with an average of three questions and we obtained a score of 3,3 to 5.

To make our analysis, we used a statistic program called SPSS.

Results and discussion:

We launched a factor analysis, and found two factors (or dimensions) for both the first part and the third part of our questionnaire. In the following, we will consider that the factors of the first part will be symbolized by F1 and F2, and the factors of the third part will be represented by F3 and F4.

The two dimensions of the first part (F1 and F2) explained 62,475% of the total variance. In the SPSS output’s table, we noticed that there were some double saturation, so we decided to take only into account the highest saturation. In the end, we decided to name the two factors F1 and F2 respectively “tolerance” and “consumption”. Concerning the reliability analysis, we found a Cronbach alpha of .853 for F1, and .730 for F2.

The two dimensions of the third part explained 58,637% of the total variance. We didn’t find any double saturation here. We found that F3 corresponded to F1, and that F4 corresponded to F2. That’s why in the end, we decided to name F3 as F1 (“tolerance”) and F4 as F2 (“consumption”). Regarding the reliability analysis, we found a Cronbach alpha of .839 for F3, and .663 for F4.

In the following table, the reader can see which questions were saturated for the four factors:

If we look back at our hypothesis, the first one consisted in comparing the average of the first part and the third part. We conducted a paired sample T-test to do so, and found out that it was not significant (p=.469; >.05) for comparing F1 and F3, even if the average of F1 was 3.42 and 3.45 for F3. Concerning F2 and F4, the result of the statistical test was significant (p.=.000; <.05), showing that the average of the third part (F4) was significantly different of the first part (F2) with respectively 2.8 for F2 and 2.6 for F4.

So we can say that the first hypothesis was partly confirmed, because two factors among four were found as significant. The short text presented to the participants effectively did influence them, for the items that concern F2 and F4 (consumption factors). Against our expectations, we can therefore deduce that, with our positive oriented text about synthetic biology, we reinforced people in the way of not consuming GMO’s.

The second hypothesis concerning the activity sector was also confirmed only for F1 and F3. We conducted an ANOVA by crossing each factor (F1, F2, F3 and F4) with the two activity sector (scientific or non-scientific). The difference between scientific and non-scientific was significant for F1 and F3, but not for F2 and F4. For F1, the answers’ average of the people working in a scientific sector was 3.63, and for the non-scientific it was 3.22. For F3, the answer’s average for the people working in the scientific sector was 3.60 against 3.30 for the non-scientific sector.

This significant difference for F1 and F3 (tolerance factors), between people working in a scientific sector and people working in a non-scientific sector means the first one had a better positive opinion about GMO’s than did the second one. As far as consumption is concerned (F2 and F4), there was not any significant difference between scientific and non-scientific. Beyond the fact that the informative text, which was presented in the questionnaire, didn’t engender any effect, we can still interpret this result as the fact that globally, everybody tolerates GMO’s, even if “scientists” show a more significant tolerance to them than do the “non-scientists”. We also noticed that for consumption, work domain doesn’t have any impact on people’s opinion; they are almost all against the fact of consuming GMO’s.

As far as the third hypothesis was concerned, none of the factor presented a significant difference between old and young participants. Nonetheless, we observed a slight difference for both F1 and F3: old people tolerated less GMO’s than did young people.

We can observe a linear evolution contingent to age and GMO’s tolerance. Young respondents seemed to better tolerate (F1 and F3) GMO’s than the older ones; nonetheless, these results are not statistically significant at all, and we should stay cautious when interpreting them.

Concerning the information level, we also conducted an ANOVA which was significant for F1 and F3. For F1, the p-value was very low (p=.001; <.05), and even lower for F3 (p=.016; <.05).

It appears that the more people are informed about GMO’s, the more they are tolerant of GMO’s (since the two factors which were found as significant are one again F1 and F3).

Conclusion:

We can say in summary that some of our hypotheses were confirmed. Many significant results appeared, but not all of which were expected.

To explain these results, we looked at the explanation from three economists (Noussair, Robin and Ruffieux, 2003) who took back this general idea of testing people, in a very interesting article that discusses opinions and behaviours of consumers facing GMO’s. They briefly summarized the scientific research around GMO’s, and mentioned what was the place of GMO’s for consumers. In an attempt to distinguish opinions from real behaviours, they highlighted the characteristics of both terms. Regarding what we found out with our results, it’s very useful to mention these characteristics here.

First of all, Noussair et al. (2003) differentiate the consumer from the citizen: the first one usually is against the fact of consuming GMO’s (as we found out in our brief research), whereas the second one is more prone to accept them as a way of consuming, not especially for himself but for the general population.

Then, the economists distinguish between private and public. Private life is the area of the consumer; it’s the particular person who buys a product. Public life is something else; it’s the citizen who gives his or her idea about GMO’s. To put it in another way, people generally don’t comment and behave the same way in a private environment as in a public environment. They probably will have a different opinion regarding the situation they are placed in.

The third distinction mentioned in the article concerns on one hand the market and on the other the survey. The second one is by nature public; it involves the opinions of many citizens. When answering such an investigation, respondents know this fact, and this might influence their answers in the direction of what they think to be the general population’s opinion about GMO’s. At the opposite, the behaviours of a particular consumer facing the market of GMO’s could be totally different from what he thinks when giving his opinion for a survey.

The last distinction that we can highlight here points out the fact that the product is different from the process. Imagine you’re a consumer going to the supermarket, and you want to buy bananas. You will probably examine different kinds of banana, and choose one which does or doesn’t contain GMO’s, following what you think about GMO’s in the matter of consumption. To put it more directly, you will focus only on the product you’re facing: is it good for the health? Imagine now that the same day you’re at a party discussing about GMO’s with friends. We can probably say that you will focus on the process by which a banana becomes a GMO’s: what kind of substances they use to transform the banana and so on?

Giving this, you might have a totally different opinion when facing the product at the supermarket (“This banana looks good and bigger than the others, because it’s a GMO’s”) than when facing friends and focussing on the process (“It’s not normal to change the course of nature by modifying organisms!”).
We can finally resume the four distinctions in the following table, which oppose behaviours from opinions:

Noussair et al. (2003) resume all of this by an example: even if a consumer might have personally an aversion to consume GMO’s, the fact that GMO’s requires less pesticides or fertilizers can lead him to have a better opinion in a survey than would suggest his individual buying decisions as a consumer.

Therefore according to these authors, we can conclude that our results, even if they are significant, have to be taken with caution because of this opposition between behaviour and opinion.

Unfortunately, it is not the only caution that we must have for our results. It is necessary to clarify that there may be some bias. Indeed, it emerged from the data sheet that more men than women answered the questionnaire (65% against 35%). Also, no social desirability scale was included in the questionnaire and maybe that our sample is not representative. Finally, in our analysis, the conditions of homogeneity of variances were not always met. That is why we carefully interpreted the results.
It would be interesting for future research to have a bigger and more representative sample. Focus groups and questionnaires with large answers would not also be free of interest. And according to Noussair and al. (2003), doing a questionnaire and then following the same sample in his intimacy to measure the difference between opinion and behaviour and going further in this research to characterize this differentiation and eventually analysing how the relation between opinion and behaviour works.

• (1) McCullum, C., Benbrook. C., Knowles, L., Roberts. S., & Schryver, T. (2003). Application of Modern Biotechnology to Food and Agriculture: Food Systems Perspective. Journal of nutrition, education and behaviour, 35(6), 319-332.
• (2) Marris, C. (2001). La perception des OGM par le public : remise en cause de quelques idées reçues. Economie Rurale, 266, 58-79.
• (3) Noussair, C., Robin, S., & Ruffieux, B. (2001). Comportement des consommateurs face aux aliments « avec OGM » et « sans OGM » : une étude expérimentale. Economie Rurale, 266, 30-44.
• (4) http://www.vivagora.org Fiche repère 3 – Les enjeux sociétaux, culturels et géopolitiques de la biologie synthétique – 4th june 2009
• (5) http://owni.fr/2011/09/15/diybio-biohaklab/