Influences on U.S. undergraduate engineering students’ perceptions of ethics and social responsibility: findings from a longitudinal study

Engineering students’ views of ethics and social responsibility can be complex, multi-faceted, and influenced by participation in diverse experiences. To explore these influences, we surveyed engineering undergraduates at four U.S. universities to understand how their perceptions of ethics and social responsibility changed over time and whether changes were related to participation in curricular and co-curricular experiences. Students were surveyed three times: during the first, fifth, and eighth semesters of their undergraduate studies. We analyse the responses of students (n = 226) who responded to all three surveys. We report results from five measures used in the survey: Fundamentals of Engineering/Situational Judgement, Ethical Climate Index, Justice Beliefs, Political and Social Involvement Scale, and Moral Disengagement. Analysis used two-way mixed ANOVA to identify changes over time on these measures, including whether changes were influenced by self-reported participation in certain experiences (internships, service-learning, ethics instruction, etc.). When we compared groups of students – those who did and did not participate in various experiences – we saw no interaction effects for most measures. We hypothesise this reflects a pattern of self-selection into experiences. Our findings suggest the difficulty of developing impactful ethics interventions, given that students arrive at university with pre-existing knowledge and perceptions about ethics and morality.