When people normally think of a psychologist they think of an old, white bearded and mind reading man, talking about penis envy and the fixation in the anal phase. Am I such a psychologist? Hm … kind of. Well I am neither white bearded nor an old man nor a man in general but my mind reading abilities are quiet good and I have to admit: penis envy is a very important topic! Ok, to be serious, psychologists have more abilities than mind reading, sitting on their red couches and smoking cigarettes. Actually, we are real empirical scientists (even if some natural scientists will doubt that) who are planning experiments, constructing psychological tests and dealing with statistical estimations. So, and if anyone still wonders why I’m here (beside of handling the uncountable breakdowns of my team members) pleas keep reading!
The psychological part of the human practice project 2010 consists of two connected parts:
The first part was the construction of a questionnaire to measure people’s acceptance toward synthetic biology. Constructing a questionnaire not just means inventing some questions and putting them together. From the psychometrical point of view constructing a questionnaire means sticking to a determined constructing principle, passing through different steps of construction and estimating statistical values to evaluate the worth of the questionnaire. My claim for this part was to construct a good and methodical correct questionnaire that can be used in future research.
If you want to know how we constructed the questionnaire, please click here:
The second part builds on the first part in using the constructed questionnaire. The aim was to prove the relationship between knowledge of synthetic biology and its acceptance. For that we invited 71 participants and divided them into three groups. Each group got another kind of knowledge respective to synthetic biology: the first group got just a basic knowledge, the second group got funded theoretical knowledge and the third group received theoretical and practical knowledge. Afterwards every participant had to fill in the questionnaire referring the acceptance of SynBio.
If you are interested in the results of our experiment please have a look:
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