2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A new assessment for savior complex in humanitarian engineering project-based learning

Presented at Community Engagement Division (COMMENG) Technical Session 1

Humanitarian engineering (HE) is a form of international project-based learning that has been touted for its ability to enhance student interest and motivation, positively impact communities across the world, and emphasize sociotechnical thinking in an engineering education context. Despite good intentions, HE has been criticized as reinforcing structures of oppression, “voluntourism,” and white saviorism. In existing literature, the “savior complex” has been qualitatively studied within the confines of defining and identifying themes associated with the phenomenon. The goal of this work is therefore to propose a method for exploring savior complex concretely and quantitatively within an engineering education setting by devising a new survey instrument that will allow educators and researchers to track savior complex and its progression over time. We developed and deployed a 23-item savior complex survey instrument in two courses with 28 students at two HE field sites in Kenya and Greece, using a multi-aspect validity framework to assess the new instrument. While the grounding of the survey items in rigorous qualitative analysis of savior complex addressed content validity, we found that the internal consistency of the instrument (α = 0.67) was slightly outside the recommended range. Statistically significant relationships between several of the savior complex items, demographic factors, and related constructs such as cultural intelligence, empathy, culture shock, and self-efficacy, also partially supported the construct validity. One preliminary finding was that students on the Kenya project were more likely to exhibit savior complex than students on the similar trip in Greece, emphasizing that savior complex is context-dependent and motivating the need to collect data at varying field sites to develop a construct that is valid across contexts. Future work will entail deployment to a larger sample of students to assess validity evidence, as well as further testing across a range of HE contexts. This assessment is a concrete step toward addressing complex issues in humanitarian engineering that lead to miscommunication, power imbalances, and ultimately unsuccessful projects.

Authors

Ogochukwu Elisha-Wigwe University of Texas at Austin [biography]

Ogo is a Nigerian PhD student in Mechanical Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin. She earned both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Miami University of Ohio. Her research lies in humanitarian design engineering and focuses on how designers and engineers are trained to work in global and cross-cultural contexts, with an emphasis on building strong contextual understanding and empathy. She is passionate about human-centered innovation and using design and technology to create meaningful, sustainable impact in resource-constrained communities. Outside of academia, Ogo enjoys traveling and exploring new regions, cooking, musicals, playing racquet sports, and embracing joy in her everyday life.
Dr. Anastasia M. Schauer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1318-4713 University of Texas at Austin [biography]

Dr. Anastasia Schauer is an Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Schauer’s research program specializes in the development and validation of tools to aid designers in producing innovative, high-quality, and equitable design outcomes. A current focus of the Design Understanding, Cognition, and Knowledge (DUCK) Lab is the study of how designers interface with technology such as virtual reality and generative artificial intelligence to result in better designs for humanitarian engineering projects and beyond. Throughout her academic career, Dr. Schauer has been recognized for her contributions to both research and teaching, receiving the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and multiple awards for her work on equitable development of engineering education curricula, including the Best Paper Award at the International Symposium on Academic Makerspaces. She received her Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2024, where her doctoral research focused on the identification and mitigation of cognitive bias in the design process. She also holds an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Cincinnati.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

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