Abstract

Earlier studies on public attitude and risk perception have concluded that the public’s attitude towards biotechnology was primarily driven by several factors such as familiarity, perceived benefits, perceived risks, risk acceptance, moral concerns and encouragement. Demographic characteristics have been known to affect many attitudes and values. The purpose of this paper is to compare the attitude of the Malaysian public in the Klang Valley region towards genetically modified soybean across several background variables such as religions, races, education level and ages. A survey was carried out on 1017 respondents from various interest groups in the Klang Valley region. Analyses of Variance showed significant differences in the mean scores for familiarity of genetically modified soybean across religions, races and ages but not across education levels and gender. Both perceived benefits and risk acceptance were found to differ across races and gender but not across religions, education levels and ages. On the other hand, perceived risks differed across religions and races but not across ages and education levels. Moral concerns was found to differ in all the four background variables except gender while encouragement only differed across races but not across the other four variables studied.