Search for: All records

Prior research on engineering students’ understandings of ethics and social responsibility has produced mixed and sometimes conflicting results. Seeking greater clarity in this area of investigation, we conducted an exploratory, longitudinal study at four universities in the United States to better understand how engineering undergraduate students perceive ethics and social responsibility and how those perceptions change over time. Undergraduate engineering students at four U.S. universities were surveyed three times: during their 1st (Fall 2015), 5th (Fall 2017), and 8th semesters (Spring 2019). The students who completed all three surveys (n = 226) comprise the sample that was analyzed in this paper for changes in their scores on five instruments: Fundamentals of Engineering/Situational Judgment, Moral Disengagement, ABET Engineering Work and Practice Considerations, Macroethics, and Political and Social Involvement Scale. We found that students modestly increased their knowledge of ethics and ability to apply that knowledge in situations calling for them to exercise judgment. In addition, they consistently indicated that health and safety considerations in engineering were of highest importance. They also showed steady levels of social consciousness over time, in contrast to other studies which detected a culture of increasing disengagement in engineering students throughout the four years of their undergraduate studies.

 

Engineering education commonly deemphasizes the moral and ethical teaching required for future engineers. Measuring the ethical values that engineering students and professionals possess, and how those views change over time, is a challenging prospect given the complexity of such concepts. One proposed method to characterize a person’s moral development is by asking them to identify a moral exemplar. In this paper, we explore who engineering students and early-career engineering professionals identify as moral exemplars and the traits and characteristics they use to describe these moral exemplars. The data used in this paper comes from a series of two longitudinal, mixed-methods projects which explored engineering students’ and professionals’ perceptions of ethics and social responsibility. During these projects, three interviews were conducted with longitudinal participants: one at the start of the first year of their engineering undergraduate studies (T1, n = 112), a second during their senior year (T2, n = 33), and a third 2-3 years after they graduated and started their engineering careers (T3, n = 20). This study focuses on interviewees' responses to one question: “Can you identify and describe someone, (for example, someone you know, a historical figure, or a famous person), that you think exemplifies moral character or professional or personal integrity?” In this paper, we identify and categorize the identities of these chosen moral exemplars. The list of categories was made and modified according to the trends we saw in moral exemplars of the engineering students. Occasionally, we had trouble determining how to categorize a response and, as a result, would put the moral exemplar into two categories. Additionally, we analyze the traits interviewees use to describe their moral exemplars, with the Big 5 Personality Traits used as an analytical framework [2]. When studying the personality traits of the moral exemplars, we would rank them from 1-10 depending on if they either positively (10) or negatively (1) align with the traits [2]. If the trait was not described, we would rank them a 0. From our analysis, a few notable patterns emerged. In T1, the largest category was family members accounting for 38% of the moral exemplars. In T2, family members were again the largest category, but now made up 22% of the moral exemplars. Additionally, around 60% of both the T1 and T2 participants cited their moral exemplars as someone they know personally. Interestingly the gender of the Moral exemplars for T1 and T2 is 68% male, 14% female and 18% other/not specified. We plan to compare the gender of the interviewees with the moral exemplars they identified to understand if there was any correlation between the two factors. We are also investigating longitudinal changes over time in the categories of the moral exemplars identified by participants. Finally, we are also comparing the personality traits of the moral exemplars described by our young engineer participants to prior work investigating the personalities of moral exemplars. 

Background: Studies of changes in engineering students’ perceptions of ethics and social responsibility over time have often resulted in mixed results or shown only small longitudinal shifts. Comparisons across different studies have been difficult due to the diverse frameworks that have been used for measurement and analysis in research on engineering ethics and have revealed major gaps between the measurement tools and instruments available to assess engineering ethics and the complexity of ethical and social responsibility constructs. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this study was to understand how engineering students’ views of ethics and social responsibility change over the four years of their undergraduate degrees and to explore the use of reflexive principlism as an organizing framework for analyzing these changes. Design/Method: We used qualitative interviews of engineering students to explore multiple facets of their understanding of ethics and social responsibility. We interviewed 33 students in their first and fourth years of their undergraduate studies. We then inductively analyzed the pairs of interviews, using the reflexive principlism framework to formulate our findings. Results: We found that engineering students in their fourth year of studies were better able to engage in balancing across multiple ethical principles and specification of said ethical principles than they could as first year students. They most frequently referenced nonmaleficence and, to a lesser degree, beneficence as relevant ethical principles at both time points, and were much less likely to reference justice and autonomy. Conclusions: This work shows the potential of using reflexive principlism as an analytical framework to illuminate the nuanced ways that engineering students’ views of ethics and social responsibility change and develop over time. Our findings suggest reflexive principlism may also be useful as a pedagogical approach to better equip students to specify and balance all four principles when ethical situations arise. 

This paper uses the critical incident technique to analyze how early career engineers experience ethics in the workplace. Our results build off a previously developed framework that categorizes critical incidents related to professional engineering ethics, but we expand the framework to address its gaps. Though there was significant overlap between our findings and the existing framework in the types of critical incidents reported by participants, in some cases the severity of a negative ethical experience was not captured by existing categories, especially when describing sexual harassment in the workplace. Many incidents also required multiple categories to accurately describe them as opposed to a single overarching descriptor. Additionally, we observed a connection between personal morality and professional ethics that was present in some critical incidents. Our observations suggest that similar types of critical incidents related to ethics may often be experienced by engineers, but more work needs to be done to expand the classification of these situations and better understand how engineers develop ethics-related competencies, especially early in their careers and in a workplace context. 

Scholars have argued that engineering practice should be understood in its societal context, including the political contexts in which engineers perform. However, very few research studies have systematically explored the political and moral backgrounds of engineering professionals, who would be the main agents in the political contexts. This paper reports our exploratory study of the political ideologies and moral foundations of engineers in the United States. Based on survey responses from 515 engineers, we conducted generalized ordinal logistic regression analyses and multiple linear regression analyses to examine how engineers’ political ideologies are associated with their moral foundations and how engineers’ political ideologies and moral foundations vary across their employment sectors, organizational positions, and demographic attributes. We found that engineers in the manufacturing sector are more politically conservative than engineers in the computer/electronics/IT sector. Additionally, engineers in higher positions in their organizations are more politically conservative than engineers in lower positions, and female engineers are more politically liberal than male engineers. We also found that engineers’ endorsement of the five moral foundations differs by sector and demographic attributes. Moreover, engineers’ moral foundations substantially explain engineers’ political ideologies, consistent with previous studies using the Moral Foundations Theory.