2025 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD)

Latina engineering students are less likely to attend graduate school than women from other ethnic or racial groups. This trend was observed in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering department of a large land-grant university for which Latine comprise approximately 20% of the engineering undergraduate enrollment. However, such statistics lack meaning without historical, racial, social, and political context. This paper, part of a larger research project, challenges deficit perspectives using an exploratory mixed methods approach.
We combined Tinto’s Collegiate Achievement Model and Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth Model, following a quantitative critical (quantcrit) perspective, to design a survey on factors influencing undergraduate students’ decision about pursuing an engineering degree. Quancrit, a methodology that challenges deficit perspectives through critical theory, presents implementation challenges. This paper reports on think-aloud sessions with four undergraduate engineering students-- three White women and one Asian man-- sharing their processing of the survey questions to guide the survey instrument development.
Low recruitment of Latina participants highlighted the difficulty of conducting equity-centered research with underrepresented communities. Understanding how students outside of our community of interest interpreted the survey questions, highlights the risk of generalizing results without context, potentially leading to incomplete conclusions. This paper discusses how the participants’ responses reveal the opportunities and constraints of creating and implementing a critical quantitative survey and how racial, ethnic, and gender identities influence students’ perceptions and responses.
Preliminary findings showed that participants did not critically engage with questions related to culture and social identities, often responding with hypotheticals about how other students might answer. Students referenced solely their hometowns as their culture, prompting us to consider how Latine students might interpret these questions differently, given their potentially more nuanced understanding of the term “culture”. When asked if obtaining their degree would combat stereotypes related to their social identities, the students showed limited awareness of existing stereotypes, including those positively associated with dominant identities in engineering (e.g., White, Asian, male). They perceived combating stereotypes as a barrier to education, rather than a motivator or act of resilience. This limitation presumes students are aware of these stereotypes and how they operate within systems of power.
The think-aloud responses also indicate a need to nuance quantcrit surveys to embed the complexities of intersectional identities. This is evident when the responses of White women students echoed post-feminist views that underrepresentation of women in engineering is an “old stereotype”, without acknowledging how intersectional identities (e.g., racial, ethnic, socioeconomic) are salient for their experiences and perceptions as engineering students.
Using think-aloud feedback, we modified and distributed our survey, in which we identified three Latine students with whom we will conduct future think-aloud sessions. This paper contributes knowledge to the field by demonstrating that challenges of quantcrit are essential for developing robust critical research. Grounding our project with a quantcrit lens allows us to approach survey design and analysis with critical awareness and encourages continued use of qualitative methods to deepen our understanding of Latina engineering students’ college experiences.