Study On University Teachers And Scientific Researchers’ Cognition, Attitude And Behavior Towards GM Technology

Transgenic technology has been developing rapidly in recent years, but it also has been accompanied by a huge controversy in the process. The public’s cognition, attitude and purchase intention towards genetically modified food have become the research focus, determining whether GM industry develops healthy or not to a great extent. On one hand, university teachers and scientific research personnel, as the general public, their cognition and attitude towards transgenic technology will influence the degree of acceptance of genetically modified crops in the market,on the other hand, as part of university teachers and researchers directly engaged in the research of transgenic technology, they have a big effect on the research progress of transgenic technology, the industrialization of genetically modified crops and relevant laws and regulations of trans-gene. Therefore, we carry out an in-depth investigation and study of 100 university teachers and scientific research personnel in Wuhan, trying to understand their cognition and attitude towards transgenic technology and analyzing factors influencing their attitudes towards transgenic technology and purchase intention of genetically modified food. Some targeted suggestions can be put forward by analyzing the influence factors of purchase intention to gm food. Then it can guide the behavior of the public.This research mainly focus on the following aspects: first, it adopts descriptive statistics method to analyze the cognition towards transgenic technology of respondents, including the cognition towards agricultural transgenic technology in protecting national food security and improving environment and the cognition towards whether agricultural transgenic technology have problems in food safety, ethical issues and environmental fields. Then it analyzes the correlation between respondents’ cognition and their individual characteristics such as gender, age, education level, professional title and the research area; second, it statistically analyzes respondents’ attitude towards transgenic technology. Based on the necessity of developing agricultural transgenic technology in China, it measures respondents’ attitude towards transgenic technology, analyzing the influence of cognition on their attitudes; third, it analyzes factors affecting respondents’ purchase intention of genetically modified food by adopting the ordinal logistic regression analysis. This paper establishes its theoretical framework on the basis of existing researches, mainly studying factors influencing respondents’ purchase intention such as attitude towards transgenic technology, transgenic knowledge, external information evaluation and safety management of transgenic technology.The results show that respondents have different cognition about the function of transgenic technology in different research fields. Respondents’ cognition towards the necessity of developing transgenic technology has relationship with their personal characteristics including gender, title and research field. Respondents’ cognition towards the function and risk of transgenic technology will influence their attitude towards transgenic technology. The government’s specification degree in transgenic technology safety management, respondents’ knowledge of trans-gene and respondents’ attitude towards transgenic technology significantly influence respondents’ purchase intention of genetically modified food. However, the evaluation of external information does not significantly influence respondents’ purchase intention of genetically modified food. Respondents’ purchase intention of different types and different traits of genetically modified food are different.In the end, this paper puts forward some policy recommendations like the government should strengthen the propaganda and scientific popularization of transgenic technology and improve the management standards of agricultural transgenic technology.