In order to evaluate our community's understanding on sunscreen (more specifically, the impacts regarding oxybenzone, coral reefs, and FDA regulations), the iGEM team at Del Norte High School released a survey on August 5, 2022. The survey included 12 original questions. They were split up into two different question formats: multiple choice and true or false. For each question, we had a “not sure” option in order to better deter people from simply guessing the answer, ensuring greater accuracy in our findings.
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Multiple choice: In how many U.S. states is oxybenzone banned? |
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True or False: Oxybenzone is FDA approved. |
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Multiple Choice: What percent of the world's coral has died since 1950? |
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True or False: Many major name-brand sunscreens still have oxybenzone as a major ingredient. |
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True or False: All products with a broad spectrum SPF rating are regulated by the FDA as sunscreen drugs. |
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Multiple Choice: What is the minimum particle size deemed safe for marine life? |
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Multiple Choice: Which approximation is closest to the yearly net economic value of coral reefs? (answers in U.S. dollars) |
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True or False: A coral reef that is bleached is automatically dead |
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True or False: Oxybenzone, along with 3 other chemicals commonly found in chemical sunscreen, are absorbed into the bloodstream at significantly greater levels than 0.5 nanograms per milliliter (above the level required for safety studies by the FDA). |
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True or False: 14,000 tons of sunscreen containing 10% oxybenzone is released to coral reefs as threats annually. |
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True or False: Oxybenzone causes coral reefs to bleach, damaging the coral's DNA and causing deformities and growth anomalies. |
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True or False: Oxybenzone is biodegradable. |
After carefully analyzing the data, we noticed a few patterns:
There were a total of 56 responses received. Out of the 12 questions, the mean accuracy was 4/12 or 33.33%, while the median was 5/12 or 41.67%. The range of the correct answers was from 0-10 points, with 0/12 being the lowest and 10/12 being the highest. Across all of the survey questions, the mean number of correct responses for each question was 20.58/56. The question with the highest number of correct responses was “True or false: Many major name-brand sunscreens still have oxybenzone as a major ingredient.” with 40/56 correct responses. This is a clear indication that, while many are frequent users of sunscreen, our community is fairly uneducated when it comes to what is in their sunscreen and how these chemicals affect the environment around us.
In contrast, the question with the lowest number of correct responses was Question 6, “Multiple Choice: What is the minimum particle size deemed safe for marine life?”, with only 4/56 correct responses. Another question with a low number of correct responses were the questions “Multiple choice: In how many U.S. states is oxybenzone banned?” and “Multiple Choice: What percent of the world's coral has died since 1950?”, each with 5/56 correct responses. For the majority of the questions, the distributions between what survey-takers picked were relatively spread out between each of the answer choices. Therefore, we conclude that for these questions, many people guessed what the right answer was. However, for the question regarding the percentage of world coral that has died since 1950, we saw a different pattern. For this question, the majority of responses chose the incorrect answer of 60%. This demonstrates that our community is aware that there has been a significant amount of coral loss in the past 70 years, but they just might not be certain on exact percentages. This is a general trend we've noticed when it comes to individuals' knowledge on climate change; many would say that climate change is an existing problem, but not many can identify the leading causes and the magnitude of its effects. Since our project aims to detect and aid in the remedy of sunscreen pollution, it was important for our team to assess our community's current level of understanding on pollution and fill in the gaps with our own research.
With this in mind, we then examined the number of times survey-takers put “not sure” as their answer for all the questions. The average number of “not sure” answers between the 12 questions was 22.83/56. The highest number of “not sure” answers on a certain question was 39/56 while the lowest number of “not sure” answers was 9/56. We found that there are an overall higher number of “not sure” answers in the multiple-choice questions (mean of 30/56) in contrast to the overall lower number of “not sure” answers in the true or false questions (mean of 19.25/56). This tells us that people are less confident about their answers when the options are more specific numbers, compared to a 50/50 chance of getting the answer correct with a true and false. Again, this is an indication that the survey takers had insufficient knowledge and were instead relying on guessing or the 'Not Sure' option. The results of this survey helped us recognize that we could make a significant improvement in our community's understanding of sunscreen, oxybenzone, pollution, and coral reefs – all of which are topics that are essential to understanding our project. This inspired us to post short infographics with the correct answers to the survey questions on our instagram page, in order to give our followers the opportunity to check their answers and learn from their mistakes.
The information from this survey is purely for statistical purposes. Each response was recorded anonymously with consent, and no personal data was collected.