Emily Hugen (Spring 2019)
This past semester, I have worked closely with Dr. Carmen Bain who is a professor at Iowa State University in the Sociology Department. I had the pleasure of working with Dr. Bain on her gene edited foods project. The overall goal of the project is to analyze the perceived factors to gaining or losing public trust in gene edited foods. This was carried out through conducting in-depth interviews with key stakeholders. My role on the project was to transcribe and code these interviews to help gain an understanding of the debate surrounding gene edited foods and the governance and regulation that the public feels most comfortable with. Transcribing the interviews consisted of listening to the interviews and typing everything that is said within the interviews. It’s important to transcribe the interviews so that there is a hard copy for the rest of the research process. Once they are transcribed, we developed codes which is another way of saying that we identified common themes across all the interviews that Dr. Bain thought would be prevalent to the direction of the research project. We then used software to code all of the interviews and capture parts of the interview that can be utilized for qualitative data. This took me throughout the whole semester. I also worked on a side project which is designing the project’s website. I gathered content, learned WordPress, and worked with ISU faculty about design and guidelines. Overall, this was enough tasks to carry me throughout the semester and learn a lot along the way.
Link to gene edited foods project.
Duration: 04/29/2019
Principal Investigator(s): Dr. Carmen Bain