Construction and Validation of an Instrument to Measure Perceptions and Attitudes towards Genetically Modified Organisms in the Mexican Urban Population

Abstract

Introduction: this paper presents the development and validation of an instrument to measure the perceptions and attitudes about the production and consumption of the Mexican urban consumers towards genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Method: The proposed questionnaire contains 63 questions that encompassed 11 latent factors that was applied to 14,720 people of the Mexican urban population aged between 18 to 65 years. This measuring questionnaire was validated using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Results: we found that it is acceptable the proposed instrument for measuring perceptions and attitudes towards genetically modified organisms (PAGMOs) for the urban Mexican population. Discussion and Conclusion: The same instrument (construct) it is suitable for each of the 8 regions studied since with the multi-group CFA performed we found evidence that this is valid for each of the regions under study. Also, the analysis of the questions of the proposed instrument revealed that participants have a low general knowledge, a high distrust towards GMOs, want labeling of genetically modified (GM) products and not perceive their social values and positive health effects beyond increasing agricultural productivity.