How engineering students define ‘Social Responsibility’

This paper presents results from engineering student responses to the open ended question “Write a few sentences explaining how you define `Social Responsibility'.” Through emergent coding methods it was found that students were most likely to use a disassociated, third person voice in their definitions, as opposed to a first person voice where they included themselves in the group that help the responsibility. The responsibility that students talked about was most commonly held toward a general community or society, and occasionally toward the environment or the world as a whole. In describing how the responsibility manifested itself, students talked most often about giving back or helping others, but also about a responsibility to conduct acts of service or charity. Finally, students infrequently directly cited a source of the responsibility, though some described ethical or moral foundations while others talked about an obligation due to possessing certain skills or privileges. Few differences were found in these definitions based on gender, academic rank, or major. Understanding how engineering student's view their social responsibility as both citizen and engineer is crucial towards shaping educational approaches to develop holistic engineers, able to work across disciplinary and cultural divides toward solutions of complex social issues.