Evolution of Students’ Varied Conceptualizations About Socially Responsible Engineering: A Four Year Longitudinal Study

Abstract

Engineers should learn how to act on their responsibility to society during their education. At present, however, it is unknown what students think about the meaning of socially responsible engineering. This paper synthesizes 4 years of longitudinal interviews with engineering students as they progressed through college. The interviews revolved broadly around how students saw the connections between engineering and social responsibility, and what influenced these ideas. Using the Weidman Input-Environment-Output model as a framework, this research found that influences included required classes such as engineering ethics, capstone design, and some technical courses, pre-college volunteering and familial values, co-curricular groups such as Engineers Without Borders and the Society of Women Engineers, as well as professional experiences through internships. Further, some experiences such as technical courses and engineering internships contributed to confine students' understanding of an engineer's social responsibility. Overall, students who stayed in engineering tended to converge on basic responsibilities such as safety and bettering society as a whole, but tended to become less concerned with improving the lives of the marginalized and disadvantaged. Company loyalty also became important for some students. These results have valuable, transferable contributions, providing guidance to foster students' ideas on socially responsible engineering.

Linking personal and professional social responsibility development to microethics and macroethics: Observations from early undergraduate education

“…These students' undergraduate experiences do not seem to have bridged the divide between personal and professional values, and may have even reinforced the initial conception that these are distinct spheres. Moreover, Rulifson and Bielefeldt (2018; 2019) have found that professional internships, important developmental experiences during later undergraduate education, can further deprioritize social responsibility as a priority. Without efforts to change a student's ranking of priorities and conception of career responsibilities, social responsibility concerns appear to take a backseat, serving as either a very minimal constraint on job choice or an aspiration that students are willing to defer to a later point in time.…”

Counteracting the Social Responsibility Slump? Assessing Changes in Student Knowledge and Attitudes in Mining, Petroleum, and Electrical Engineering

“…Our research therefore provides some quantitative data that women students who persist in engineering do, on average, express higher desires to work for socially responsible companies than do their male counterparts. This sample, of course, excludes women who leave engineering because they do not see connections between engineering and their senses of professional social responsibility [2][3]. This provides one possible explanation for why women engineering students seem to express greater desires for socially responsible careers: many of those who persist have been able to make the connection between social responsibility and engineering, whereas those who were not able to make the connection may have left.…”

“…Social responsibility is a key touchstone of the engineering profession, yet research shows that engineering students' perceptions of the importance of public welfare actually decrease as they progress through the undergraduate curriculum [1][2]. This has direct implications for the diversity of engineering students and workforces.…”

“…This has direct implications for the diversity of engineering students and workforces. Research with civil, environmental, and mechanical engineering students also finds that student perceptions of the connection between social responsibility and engineering shape their decisions to stay in their majors, and that women are more likely to leave engineering when they view those connections to be lacking and encounter decontextualized technical courses and unsupportive environments [2][3]. Engineering educators frequently invoke research findings that women and racial/ethnic minorities are more sensitive to social justice concerns and more likely to pursue engineering careers with an explicit sense of social and environmental responsibility [1,4,5].…”

Military-Bound and Veteran Student Views on Socially Responsible Engineering

“…Engineering ethics education could include both microethics (relating to individual actions) and macroethics (the collective responsibility of the profession) [9], as well as targeting both cognitive and affective attributes [10]. It has been demonstrated that engineering students and practitioners possess a range of nuanced understandings about the professional social responsibilities of engineers [11][12][13]. The military is also a profession [4].…”