Applying Phenomenography to Develop a Comprehensive Understanding of Ethics in Engineering Practice

Abstract

This Work-in-Progress Research paper describes (1) the contemporary research space on ethics education in engineering; (2) our long-term research plan; (3) the theoretical underpinnings of Phase 1 of our research plan (phenomenography); and (4) the design and developmental process of a phenomenographic interview protocol to explore engineers' experiences with ethics. Ethical behavior is a complex phenomenon that is complicated by the institutional and cultural contexts in which it occurs. Engineers also have varied roles and often work in a myriad of capacities that influence their experiences with and understanding of ethics in practice. We are using phenomenography, a qualitative research approach, to explore and categorize the ways engineers experience and understand ethical engineering practice. Specifically, phenomenography will allow us to systematically investigate the range and complexity of ways that engineers experience ethics in professional practice in the health products industry. Phenomenographic data will be obtained through a specialized type of semi-structured interview. Here we introduce the design of our interview protocol and its four sections: Background, Experience, Conceptual, and Summative. We also describe our iterative process for framing questions throughout each section.

Ways of Experiencing Ethics in Engineering Practice: Variation and Factors of Change

“…To capture variety and breadth of the experiences of ethical engineering practice, our research team developed a pre-interview screening survey to select participants [44]. Of the over 100 survey responses, we selected 43 interview participants to ensure variation on several criteria, including years of experience, workplace roles, gender, and academic degrees.…”

Experiencing Ethical Engineering Practice

“…Three separate interviewers, including authors Fila and Hess, led interviews for one respective company each, and author Kim joined in as many interviews as possible. Previously, we documented the process behind the design of the interview protocol [6] and the steps we utilized to ensure research quality [8].…”

“…A subset of participants (n = 25) from the phenomenographic study [6] were randomly selected for additional critical incident analysis. Post-hoc, we checked for variation in demographics (e.g., gender, degree, role) to ensure sufficient differences among the participants.…”

“…Second, in the future work we intend to more thoroughly consider the connection between these critical incident study and the phenomenographic study [6], [7]. For example, we will likely analyze whether certain themes of change were more prominent for participants in certain phenomenographic categories of ways of experiencing ethical engineering.…”

“…Our NSF-funded research project intends to address that concern by first exploring the various ways that engineers experience ethics in practice and then analyzing what influences that variation in experiences [6], [7]. In the first phase of the project, we utilized phenomenography to develop a comprehensive framework, grounded in the lived experiences of engineers, that describes variation in ways of experiencing engineering ethics.…”