Examining the role of culture in assessing individual ethical reasoning on multidisciplinary engineering project teams

摘要

Engineering is becoming an increasingly global profession, requiring interaction with diverse sets of people from different countries, cultures, and traditions. This diversity introduces more social and ethical complexity to the profession and highlights the importance of enabling engineers to work collaboratively and develop strong ethical decision-making skills. This study examines the relationship between cultural differences and students' individual ethical decision-making and reasoning skills. We conducted this study across four universities with distinct project-based multidisciplinary engineering programs. We developed an instrument for assessing individual ethical reasoning based on a neo-Kohlbergian framework as part of a larger project. This study employs a mixed methods approach to investigate the ways cultural differences in this instrument might affect findings. We conducted statistical tests to examine how the instrument performs across different cultural factors of primary language, ethnicity, and gender. In addition to administering the instrument, we conducted semi-structured interviews with students from all four programs to probe how they understand and handle ethics in the context of their project teams, as well as how cultural differences may play in to these perceptions. This study contributes to our understanding of the cultural perspectives embedded in participants' discourses and reasoning about engineering ethics in general and ethical decision-making processes in engineering project teams.