2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Promoting ethical engineering research within a discipline requires a thorough understanding of the challenges and variations in ways engineering faculty members experience, understand, and practice ethical research within that discipline. Such understanding is particularly important in biomedical engineering given its novel and interdisciplinary nature, potential to affect human life and well-being, and the unique types of ethical issues biomedical engineering faculty members may encounter when compared to other types of engineering.

We seek to support the above understanding by addressing three sequenced research questions: (1) What are the qualitatively different ways of experiencing and understanding ethical engineering research by faculty members in biomedical engineering?; (2) What critical factors influence ways of experiencing and understanding ethical engineering research by faculty members in biomedical engineering?; and (3): How can faculty members’ experiences with ethical engineering research inform more effective educational heuristics for preparing ethical engineering researchers? We address our first research question via phenomenography, our second research question via Critical Incident Technique, and our third research question by identifying educational heuristics grounded in the phenomenographic and critical incident data.

We have conducted 25 phenomenographic interviews and used these data to develop emergent results associated with each research question. In addition, we have begun collecting a second round of interviews (focused on the second research question) with the same set of interviewees, .

To address our first research question, we have identified six distinct categories representing “ways of experiencing” ethical engineering research. The not-yet-final categories include: (1) working toward equity, (2) following the rules, (3) working within a good process, (4) stewarding a contributing lab, (5) working within roles and responsibilities, and (6) working within a challenging system. Our next steps involve finalizing the categories and developing an outcome space that represents variation in ways of experiencing ethical engineering research.

To address our second research question, we have extracted 145 critical incidents from the 25 phenomenographic interviews, grouped incidents into 14 incident types, and grouped incident types into five categories: (1) cultural immersions, (2) ethical actions, (3) novel perspectives, (4) training events, and (5) reflection associations. The next steps in this analysis involve completing a second round of interviews with participants, wherein participants interrogate this current set of findings and provide additional, potentially novel critical incidents.

To address our third research question, we have begun generating heuristics representing what faculty members have done, have experienced in their own development, or aspire to do to promote ethical engineering research. Accordingly, the heuristics represent what faculty members might do to promote ethical engineering research and how they might do it.

Upon completion of this study, we will have a better understanding of how biomedical engineering faculty experience and understand ethical engineering research; critical factors that influence ways of experiencing ethical engineering research; and educational heuristics grounded in the lived experiences of biomedical engineering faculty. We hope these findings will help promulgate evidence-based approaches to improving ethical engineering research in engineering disciplines, broadly.