Developing conceptual and methodological foundations for a cross-cultural, multi-institutional study of ethical reasoning and moral dispositions of engineering students

Abstract

This full research paper develops a framework for using comparative case
studies to triangulate with quantitative survey data in engineering
ethics education research.Ethics has long been recognized as crucial to
responsible engineering, but the increasingly globalized environments of
contemporary engineering present challenges to effective engineering
ethics training. An overarching goal of our team’s larger project is to
examine the effects of culture and education on ethics training in
undergraduate engineering students at universities in the United States,
China, and the Netherlands to assess how this training impacts
students’ ethical reasoning and moral dispositions, and how this differs
cross-culturally. To gauge students’ moral dispositions and ethical
reasoning skills and to measure any change in these, we administer the
Moral Foundations Questionnaire and the Engineering & Science Issues
Test to engineering students longitudinally over four years. Because
the conditions related to engineering ethics education differ widely per
participating institution, interpreting and analyzing survey
quantitative data will require understanding the contextual conditions
of education at each institution. In this paper we ask the question what
and how can case study methods contribute to longitudinal and
cross-cultural ethics educational research with large data sets? To
answer it, we develop conceptual and methodological foundations for the
design of comparative, multi-institutional case studies to
contextualize, complement, and interpret quantitative and qualitative
data on ethical reasoning and moral dispositions. We develop comparative
case studies to supply missing contextual information for triangulation
with quantitative and qualitative data and to provide a more complete
picture of the engineering ethics educational contexts, strategies, and
practices at each of the participating universities. In this project,
case studies provide informational and contextual significance to the
other sources of data our research produces, elucidating conditions
required to understand and make sense of the results of the research. In
the paper we introduce our research project, motivate the use of case
studies in our research by reviewing literature on case studies and
multi-method triangulation in educational research. We explain how
specific cases will be designed, and by providing the first step of two
cases, timelines of ethics interventions for two degree programs,
demonstrate the informational and interpretive need for comparative case
studies in triangulating with other data sources. By using multiple
case design to compare universities’ approaches in this frame, our
analysis can respond to particular institutional educational contexts
and cultural and language factors, make cross-cultural comparisons, and
offer recommendations about responsible and culturally responsive
engineering ethics education.