Recycle Yourself! An Analysis of Sociological Factors Affecting the Decision to Donate Organs in US Sub-populations

Overview

Objectives/Goals In the US, there are 105, 567 people waiting to receive an organ on the organ donor list. 18 people die every day because they did not receive the organ that they needed to save their life. According to the Health Resources & Services Administration (HRSA), the need to increase the number of donors from various ethnic groups is particularly important since the chance of getting a match is greater from people of the same race and the need for transplant in some groups is disproportionately high, frequently due to a high incidence of some medical conditions. Based on this information, I took an informal poll within my community about how many people were organ donors. I was surprised to see that not many people were. I recognized that this is a problem, and I wanted to explore some of the aspects within my own community that were factors in making the decision to sign up to be an organ donor. Methods/Materials Google Docs, Facebook, QR code, e-mail, hard copies and Microsoft Excel. I used Google Docs to develop an online survey designed to capture a cross sectional population sample. Survey was distributed through social media, email and hard copies. QR code was developed and used. Hard copies were input. Data was analyzed and graphs were made using Microsoft Excel. About a 1000 requests were made, and about 795 electronic surveys were completed. Of 100 paper surveys that were distributed, about 30 were completed and returned. Results 825 surveys were collected. 84 were eliminated as being out of bounds because respondents do not live in the US. Participation bias led to collection of more Muslims than (n=402) and Christians (n=258) than Other Religions (n=81). All data sets were used, with the Muslim data set being a representative sample size for the 8,000,000 US sub-population and the other sets used as an anecdotal trend comparison. 72% of the Christians and 69% of the Other Religions are donors, while only 10% of Muslims are donors. Conclusions/Discussion It appears that the US Muslim sub-population requires a significant level of education on the organ donation process, and how their religion views this process. Since one person can save 8 lives through deceased organ donation, even a slight increase in sign-ups could potentially save 1000 of lives.

Awards (1)

• First Place

Competition history

• CSEF 2013 Behavioral & Social Sciences · Entry J0401

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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