Collaborative Proposal: Early Career Engineers' Views of Ethics and Social Responsibility: Trends, Influences, and Contexts

Collaborative Proposal: Early Career Engineers' Views of Ethics and Social Responsibility: Trends, Influences, and Contexts Public Abstract

Responding to frequent concerns about a lack of attention to ethics in engineering education and professional practice, a variety of formal course-based interventions and informal or extracurricular programs have been created and assessed to improve the social and ethical commitments of engineering graduates. Additionally, many employers offer or require training in ethics, compliance, and related topics.

Most prior research into the impacts of such experiences has focused on engineering students, especially undergraduates. There have been very few studies that have tracked these students as they enter the workforce in order to study the impacts of these experiences early in their careers.

This project explores how early career engineers’ perceptions of ethics and social responsibility change in the transition from undergraduate engineering degree programs to the workplace (or graduate studies) and how those perceptions are shaped or influenced. It also asks how those perceptions vary depending on an individual’s engineering discipline, background, and current professional setting.

Specific priority is given to investigating differences in perceptions and experiences among underrepresented groups. In addition to contributing to the literature and impacting practices in engineering education and professional ethics, the findings from this project have implications for workforce development by revealing how employers can better align onboarding programs, professional development opportunities, and organizational climate with the views and perceptions of young professionals.

This study uses both survey (quantitative) and interview (qualitative) research methods. Data is being gathered in two phases. The first study phase will begin by surveying and interviewing participants from a prior study who are now early career professionals and/or pursuing graduate degrees.

The responses of participants in these surveys and interviews can be compared to their prior responses as engineering students, making visible how their perceptions have changed over time and across the transition from school to professional practice. In the second phase of the study, a new group of participants will be surveyed and interviewed, which will allow for a larger and more diverse participant pool.

Appropriate statistical techniques will be used to investigate longitudinal changes and group-level results in the survey data set, while thematic and phenomenographic approaches will be used to analyze the interview data. This analysis will shed light on how young career engineers’ perceptions of social and ethical responsibility are shaped by their experiences in their undergraduate studies and their current contexts.

This proposal was funded through the ER2 program by the CISE directorate.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.