2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The purpose of this full research paper is to describe the development and piloting of an interview protocol to explore epistemic (in)justice within undergraduate engineering women’s academic experiences using narrative analysis.
Women’s underrepresentation in engineering is well-documented, and numerous efforts in the past decades have fought to increase women’s presence in engineering spaces. However, women continue to participate in engineering as a minority despite policies supporting their inclusion. To explore the limited progress in women’s inclusion in engineering, engineering education research (EER) has looked to epistemology and other epistemic theories. Researchers are looking into the epistemic dimensions of engineering education to understand the cultural foundations that undermine policies and practices that support diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. One such theory researchers utilize explores justice in epistemic interactions, aptly named epistemic injustice. We employ epistemic injustice to explore undergraduate women engineering students’ stories and produce contextually specific epistemic snapshots of women in engineering. Women’s stories of epistemic injustice in their engineering experiences will highlight possible misalignments between inclusive policies for women and their realities of being part of a minority population in engineering.
To build women’s epistemic stories, the present study develops an epistemic injustice interview protocol consistent with the methods of narrative analysis and the three interview data collection approach. As this protocol has not been tested in EER, a piloting phase was necessary to ensure the quality of the data collection instrument. This paper details the development and underlying approaches to quality of an instrument that helps us answer the following questions:
RQ1. How do women engineering students describe their experiences of epistemic (in)justice?
RQ2. How do women engineering students interpret the impact of epistemic (in)justice on their own personal epistemologies in the context of or regarding the engineering field?
In this paper, we elaborate on the stages of instrument development—including method justification, building a preliminary interview protocol, peer review, piloting, and refinement—along with the multiple hardships we faced trying to build epistemic stories. First, we explain the alignment between narrative analysis and the three narrative interview structure. Then, we connect the basic outline of the interview protocol to theoretical backing, showing how each question measures a particular form of epistemic injustice. During the peer review phase, we detail the contributions of multiple research groups in refining word choice, question types, and question order in the preliminary interview protocols. Lastly, we go through the piloting and refinement process, in which we illustrate how we used the lessons learned from each pilot to make changes to the interviews, both in protocol composition and in interviewer style.
Results from the piloting phase include a refined three-interview protocol that captures women undergraduate students’ experiences of epistemic injustice and their conceptualizations of personal epistemology. The impact of the pilot phase in the larger study includes instrument refinement and skill development to collect rich data through effective narrative interviewing technique. Future work includes continuing the research process and collecting data using the protocol instrument developed from the pilot phase.