A model for the development of personal and professional social responsibility for engineers

Abstract

Important attributes for engineering professionals include an understanding of the global and societal impacts of engineering projects and a well-developed professional and ethical code of responsibility; these attributes must be developed in engineering students. Furthermore, the role of an engineer is becoming increasingly global, requiring an international perspective and cross-cultural skills. The core foundation for these skills can be found in a well-developed sense of social responsibility, contextualized by the engineering profession. In this paper a new model for the development of personal and professional social responsibility is proposed, the Professional Social Responsibility Development Model. This model is a combination of three existing theoretical models describing altruistic behavior development, commitment levels to social issues and volunteering, and the integration of social issues into scientific processes. The first generation of an assessment tool based upon the constructs of the development model has been designed. The reliability of the assessment tool is established through test-retest and internal consistency, while validity is established by content and construct validity methods. Based upon the reliability and validity results, further development of this assessment tool is underway in order to develop a tool which can be used to assess engineering students' understanding of social responsibility from multiple disciplines and academic years in a pre-post format. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.