Team:TU Darmstadt/Human Practices
HUMAN PRACTICES
THE THEORY
The idea of the Human Practices is to look beyond the daily lab work, reflect about our project and to take it to the outside world. Often, it is observed how one’s project is perceived by society to therefore be able to evaluate its success potential.
Especially in dialogue with society, it is of great interest to get a broad range of views with detailed information to evaluate current situations and possible strategies. Unfortunately, this kind of research comes with huge effort and expenses concerning preparations, execution and analysis. Additionally, the number of people surveyed has to be high enough for the results to be significant, which is not doable for a student team.
In order to still be able to evaluate how our project is recognized by the public we decided to interview politicians as representatives of people in the general public. As decision-makers for laws, regulations and funding in their respective state they play an important role for the future of synthetic biology. They also carry important topics into the general public and thus influence them. In addition to that, they do also have a good impression of the general opinion of their voters concerning certain topics.
The Procedure
The core idea was to depict the politician’s opinions concerning synthetic biology. Getting to know their attitude towards the topic and introducing our project and aims should help us assess weather our idea is implementable on a political level. To also survey the opinion of the voters we used the proximity of the politicians to their respective electorates. The question is if the politicians would introduce our project to their voters as a good example of sufficient safety measures in the field of synthetic biology. To gather the maximum amount of information, the interviews were held in a way that the interviewees could answer as freely as possible.
To ensure that our approach is scientifically correct in the field of sociology the questionnaire had to be standardized and the interviewers had to be specifically trained to hold all interviews in the same manner so that every interview could be held under comparable conditions. To ensure we did it correctly we consulted Dr. Klees, an expert in poll-taking and in addition to that, a social studies student joined our team in order to support us with the evaluations.
As a tool for standardization, our questionnaire contained a detailed introduction with sufficient comments for the interviewer on how to behave during the interview. By employing these strict guidelines, we were able to ensure that the interviewer does not forget to list all the important information or influences the interviewee due to lack of experience or nervousness.
After the introduction in which iGEM was briefly explained, we proceeded with the questions which were devided into 4 parts: general questions about genetic engineering, specific questions concerning the different kinds of genetic engineering, the introduction of our project in particular and asking the interviewees about their opinion on it.
In the conclusion part we extended our questions to find out about the politician’s voters’ opinion and asked whether projects like ours could have a positive effect on their electorate and cause them to be more open-minded about synthetic biology.
In our case, every area of questions contains openly and closed posed questions. This approach is rather unusual for such a low number of interviewees. This procedure was executed so that other teams could ideally re-use our questionnaire and interview under the same conditions as we did, or just slightly change it to survey whole groups of population.
The interviews have all been held in the premises of the interviewee and were fully recorded. The resulting transcripts are in our possession, but will not be published due to privacy rights. The data can be assessed on demand in our lab on site, though.
The questionnaire itself has been published and is accessible and reusable for everyone.
For better understanding of our preparations and making it easier to use our questionnaire for your own needs we are providing the questionnaire and a guideline of our preparations.
References
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