Team:Montpellier/Human Practices

Integrated HP

The Project with the Public

Public’s opinion

During our project we had the occasion to talk about our research to a lot of different people (more information can be found in our Education and Public Engagement page). Those discussions were informative about the view people could have about synthetic biology and our project. Some of the main concerns can be found on Figure 1.

Figure 1: Concerns and comments people gave about our project.

Survey

By having the idea of our project, we immediately realised that we needed a way to introduce our project to the non scientific community. Moreover, in order to integrate our project into society, we first need to know what the people want, and also, how deeply they know the subject.That’s why we first created a survey asking questions about contraception, hormonal treatments, the use of genetically engineered organisms and consequences on the environment.

We wanted to have an overview of the perception of contraception and genetically engineered organisms by the general population. We developed a poll to probe as much people as we could: our survey was answered by 1163 people in both English and French. In the poll we are asking general questions about people, their contraceptives mean, their satisfaction about it. Then we went further with question about GMOs and their perceptions, then asking their view about a contraceptive mean such as ours.

The survey was mainly answered by women (Figure 2).

Figure 2: Pie chart of the Gender Identity.

The people that answered the poll were fairly young with an over representation of people between 18 and 25, over 50% of the poll responders (Figure 3).

We also have an over representation of people with high level of education (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Pie chart of the education level.

And finally nearly all probed people were from France (Figure 5).

Then knowing our population sample we asked their contraceptive mean (Figure 6).

This was more or less representative of the general population of France, except for the so called “natural method”. We discovered that militants of this method heard about our project, and decided to make their voice heard about how they disprove it. We wanted to notify this only because they were over represented in our poll (about 20%) compared to the French population (3%) and hence could biased our poll. As a note the “natural method” is based on temperature measurements and self-assessment of the viscosity of vaginal secretions…
COMMENTAIRE JEROME