2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

WIP: Adaptation of The Life Stressor Checklist to Study Racialized Stress Among Black and Latiné Undergraduate Engineering Students

Presented at ERM WIP II: Equity & Accessibility in Engineering Education

This methods Work in Progress (WIP) research paper presents the adaptation of the Life Stressor Checklist-Revised (LSC-R) to Black and Latiné (BL) undergraduate engineering students. The LSC-R questionnaire contains items that measure traumatic and other stressful life events, stressors that can arise from traditional engineering education. Specifically, for BL students, traditional engineering education has the propensity to result in stress, distress, and trauma. Furthermore, the marginalized identities of BL students further exacerbate their traumatic historically raced or racialized experiences. Adapting the LSC-R to the engineering context requires an examination of its validity. We modified the LSC-R and examined the face and content validity using data collected from a sample of five BL undergraduate engineering students of different majors who took part in cognitive interviews carried out at a large R1 state university in the Midwestern United States. The results indicate good psychometric properties of the adapted version of the LSC-R, supporting its potential use in studying racialized stress among BL undergraduate engineering students.

Authors

Mr. Mark Okoth Onyango http://orcid.org/https://0009-0003-0615-2187 University of Cincinnati [biography]

Mark Onyango is an Engineering Education doctoral student at The University of Cincinnati. He earned his master’s degree in information and communication engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology’s School of Electronics and Information Engineering in Harbin, China and holds a Bachelor of Education (Technical Education-Electrical) from Moi University in Eldoret, Kenya. With work experience spanning engineering industry and teaching in technical and vocational training institutions, my research centers on engineering workforce development among underrepresented groups with a focus on efforts to advance solutions on broadening participation in engineering spaces in college.
Elahe Vahidi University of Cincinnati
Kaitlyn Anne Thomas University of Nevada, Reno [biography]

Ms. Thomas is a doctoral student at University of Nevada, Reno in Engineering Education. Her background is in structural engineering. She received her bachelor's and master's degrees in civil engineering from Southern Methodist University. Her research focus is in epistemology and epistemic injustice in engineering.
Dr. Kelly J Cross http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5879-9001 Georgia Institute of Technology [biography]

Dr. Cross is currently an Assistant Professor in the Biomedical Engineering Department at Georgia Tech.
Dr. Adam Kirn http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-6344-5072 University of Nevada, Reno [biography]

Adam Kirn is an Associate Professor of Engineering Education at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Dr. Whitney Gaskins University of Cincinnati [biography]

Dr. Gaskins is an Associate Dean in the University of Cincinnati College of Engineering and Applied Science. Whitney earned her Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering, her Masters of Business Administration in Quantitative Analysis and her Doctorate of Philosophy in Biomedical Engineering/Engineering Education. In 2009, she founded The Gaskins Foundation, a non-profit organization, who launched the STEMulates year-round K-12 program that introduces more students to math and science, that currently offers programming in five cities.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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For those interested in:

Broadening Participation in Engineering and Engineering Technology
engineering
race/ethnicity
undergraduate