“I Am an Engineer AND”: A Mixed Methods Study of Socially Engaged Engineers

Abstract

Background Socially engaged engineering activities such as community development have grown rapidly in popularity. The engineers who participate in these activities seem more diverse and more broadly interested than the larger population of engineers in the United States.Purpose/Hypothesis This article compares the personal attributes, specifically personality traits and motivations to study engineering, of members of a prominent engineering service organization, Engineers Without Borders (EWB-USA), with the attributes of engineers who were not members.Design/Method Using an exploratory, sequential mixed methods approach that combined variable-oriented analysis of interviews and focus groups with multiple logistic regression models from responses to a national survey, we compared engineers' personality traits and motivations to study engineering.Results Results indicate that both EWB-USA members and nonmembers exhibit strong personality traits for conscientiousness and emotional stability. Both members and nonmembers have similar intrinsic engineering interests and motivations. EWB-USA members have significantly stronger personality traits for openness to experience and agreeableness, stronger motivations for social good, and broader interests than do nonmembers.Conclusions EWB-USA members have personal attributes that match those of other engineers, but they have broader interests and motivations than do other engineers. These differences suggest including socially engaged engineering activities in engineering may increase the number and broaden the diversity of engineering students and practitioners.

Developing a Role Identity as an Ambassador through Hands-On Activities

“…Students may be attracted to organizations that convey values aligned with their personal and professional goals [6][7][8][9] . For some students the messages that engineering outreach programs convey, such as the application of engineering to solving the world's problems [10] , the need for diversity among engineers [11] and the fact that engineering involves problem solving, [12] are congruent with their own goals for a professional career in which they engage in work that ameliorates societal problems.…”

Impact-Driven Engineering Students: Contributing Behavioral Correlates

“…In 2007 Charles Vest, former President of MIT and the National Academy of Engineering, noted: "this current generation of young people […] very much want to make the world a better place and very few of them see or understand engineering as a mechanism for doing that" (NAE, 2007). Increased attention to social impact in engineering is evident in engineering literature (AustinBreneman & Yang, 2013;Baillie, Pawley, & Riley, 2012;Mattson & Wood, 2014;Mattson & Winter, 2016;Schafer, Parks, & Rai, 2011) as well as engineering education literature (Lucena, 2013;Sandekian, Chinowsky, & Amadei, 2014;Litchfield & Javernick-Will, 2015;Litchfield, Javernick-Will, & Maul, 2016). However, to date, many engineering and social sustainability efforts have had mixed success (Wood & Mattson, 2016), and engineers, students, and educators would be wise to be mindful that their well-intentioned efforts can do harm Starr, 2017;Anderson, 1999).…”

“…Eccles hypothesized that engineering appeals less to women because they have strong "humanistic and helping values" and that engineering among other STEM career options is often perceived as not sharing these values. In studying a subset of engineering students and professionals participating in impact-driven work (Engineers Without Borders USA) and those not participating in such work, Litchfield and Javernick-Will (2015) found that women were over-represented in their impact-driven sample. However, in analyzing a sample of engineering students and professionals not involved in impact-driven work, they found that women did not show stronger "social good" motivations than men.…”

Recommended Practices for Managing Large, Multi-Site Engineering Education Research Data Collection Projects

“…Tradeoffs and failed negotiations are rarely mentioned. In the most recent year of the Journal of Engineering Education, there are six multi-site studies [1][2][3][4][5][6] , none of which describe their procedures for coordinating data collection beyond the rationale underlying the sampling of sites. Although researchers who have invested several years in a particular multi-site study or who have conducted several such studies have the benefit of hindsight, this situation does not provide much learning in the broader field or among novice researchers planning their first multiinstitutional and collaborative study.…”