Lazlo Stepback
The engineering profession has immense impacts on the public and society, thus it is critical that engineering students are taught how to be ethical engineers. It is also important that engineering educators continuously find ways to further improve engineering ethics education. There is some evidence that suggests students’ personal morality can be used as an effective scaffold to teach engineering ethics, but this first requires that engineering ethics educators understand how students perceive the relationship between personal morality and engineering ethics. The goal of this study is to answer the following two research questions:RQ1: How do engineering students and early-career engineers discursively construct their perceptions of the relationship between personal morality and engineering ethics?RQ2: How do the participants’ constructions and perceptions of the relationship between personal morality and engineering ethics change across their education and into their early career?This dissertation presents the results of a multilevel discourse analysis conducted on longitudinal interview data from 13 participants who were interviewed three times about their perceptions of engineering ethics and social responsibility. The participants were initially interviewed as first-year engineering students, then as fourth-year students, and finally as early-career engineers about two years after graduation. The discourse analysis resulted in a map of articulations and (dis)articulations that describes the various ways in which the participants constructed their perceptions of the relationship between personal morality and engineering ethics. Additionally, there are four emergent themes that describe the articulations being made and a fifth theme that describes the longitudinal changes present in the data. In Theme 1, I describe how participants articulated their perspective that personal morality and engineering ethics are the same, or that engineering ethics is an extension or application of personal morality to engineering practice. In Theme 2, I show how participants connected personal morality to engineering ethics by articulating connections with moral principles and virtues that are relevant to both domains. In Theme 3, I show how some participants articulated morality as ambiguous, uncertain, or relative. In Theme 4, I show how some participants connected personal morality to engineering ethics by articulating connections between personal moral identity and professional moral identity, while other participants viewed personal and professional identity as more distinct. Finally, in Theme 5 I highlight the longitudinal consistency in participants’ perspective but also show some specific changes present in the data.Together, these results demonstrate that the participants of this study perceive personal morality and engineering ethics to be closely related and construct this perception through various interconnected articulations. The results of this study also suggest that engineering ethics pedagogy would benefit from activities that explicitly ask students to reflect on how their personal values connect to engineering ethics. Future research informed by this study could explore how more experienced engineers construct their perceptions of the relationship between personal morality and engineering ethics. Additionally, the results of this study could support research into the efficacy of various approaches to teaching engineering ethics.