Volunteerism in Engineering Students and Its Relation to Social Responsibility

Abstract

Addressing how engineering students view their role in society, their social responsibility, is seen as a central aspect toward creating holistic engineers who are able to address complex social issues. The Professional Social Responsibility Development Model (PSRDM) provides a framework for social responsibility development in engineers. Included in this model is a cycle where feelings of professional obligation to help others are enhanced through engaging in service. This study set out to characterize volunteerism among engineering students and to attempted to relate community service activities with views of social responsibility.Data for this study were collected through the Engineering Professional Responsibility Assessment (EPRA) which was developed to operationalize the PSRDM. The survey was distributed to undergraduate engineering students at 17 universities in the spring of 2014. Over 1880 undergraduate students from a diversity of majors and academic ranks completed the survey, including Likert-type items measuring their views of social responsibility and detailing their previous volunteer histories by both activity and frequency. Students reported their level of participation in 17 different volunteer or community service activities during college, or could write-in their own activity. The most frequently cited activities were: unpaid tutoring of college students; tutoring elementary or secondary children, and donating blood (40-47%). A high percentage of students (25-35%) also participated in service-learning projects, community service via a professional society (ASCE, ASME, AAEE, etc.), unpaid coaching or sports camp volunteer, food bank volunteer, or a short term on-site service project (i.e. spring break service trip, EWB/ESW in-country work). Thirty-six percent of the students also wrote-in a unique service activity. The median activity level during college for most of these common community service activities was more than twice but not routinely. Only 6.5% of the students reported no level of participation in volunteer or community service activities.

Implementing Service-Learning Programs in Physical Education; Teacher Education as Teaching and Learning Models for All the Agents Involved: A Systematic Review

“…These data are consistent with those observed in other systematic reviews [ 51 ], whose research focused on SL and its interaction with university social responsibility. Only one in 24 studies used a quantitative method [ 96 ]. Willard and Crandall [ 58 ] argue that future researchers should consider the collection of qualitative data in the form of student reflections, as they are already a crucial tool in the study of SL.…”

Collegiate service engagement correlations with engineering job selection and satisfaction

“…The PSRDM framework posits that engagement in forms of service is the mechanism through with one's feelings of obligation and desire to help others through their profession deepens. Results have shown that there are strong correlations between engineering student's views of social responsibility and participation in service experiences 9,37 .…”

Undergraduate Students Benefits from Involvement in K-12 Outreach

“…in 2-sided test 0.089 from SPSS). Previous research found a correlation between undergraduate engineering student participation in volunteer activities (including a variety of community service activities) and social responsibility scores [21]. This correlation is logical; a higher sense of social responsibility is likely to motivate a student to participate in volunteer activities [16,18].…”

“…In previous research, Pickering et al [8] noted "female engineers demonstrate a large interest in [K-12] outreach efforts" (p. 1), and that the engineering college students participating in the outreach program at their institution were 40-60% females (higher than ~32% female students in engineering at the institution). Previous research identified higher participation rates in volunteer activities of female versus male undergraduate engineering students, among 1885 students at 17 universities [21]. More specifically, a higher percentage of female than male engineering students reported tutoring elementary and secondary students (54% vs. 43%, respectively) [21].…”