2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This empirical research brief builds on previous work to better understand how involvement in humanitarian engineering projects (HEPs) can impact a participant’s professional responsibility and inclusive behaviors. Research in this field has already shown connections between professional responsibility and HEPs, but little research has been done to connect these to inclusive behaviors. This project theorizes that HEPs can expose participants to new people and perspectives providing a space to learn and practice equity and inclusivity while creating positive impact. So far, this research has uncovered correlations between professional responsibility and inclusive behaviors as well as some differences among those who have and have not participated in a HEP. This paper describes regression analysis performed on the data to investigate path models between these factors. Data was collected using a survey including two validated instruments: the Engineering Professional Responsibility Assessment (EPRA) and the Valuing Diversity and Enacting Inclusion in Engineering (VDEIE). Two factors from each instrument were chosen for further analysis based on their relevance and insight to the research objective: professional connectedness (PC) and personal connectedness (CO) from the EPRA as well as challenging discrimination (CD) and promoting a healthy work environment (PH) from the VDEIE. Three participant groups were included: current engineering students of Lipscomb University, alumni of Lipscomb engineering, and professional engineers not affiliated with Lipscomb. Demographic data and information about HEP participation was also collected. This paper will describe the proposed theoretical model, the associated path analysis, and the resulting relationships. Direct and indirect relationships as well as path strengths were investigated to finalize the relational model between HEPs, professional responsibility, and inclusive behaviors. From this analysis, the authors found that HEPs can predict professional responsibility which then predicts inclusive behaviors. Interestingly, HEPs do not predict inclusive behaviors directly but rather indirectly through professional responsibility. Further, inclusive behaviors do not predict involvement in HEPs. This suggests that HEPs can create inclusive engineers indirectly through improving professional responsibility. Other relationships are proposed and suggested based on thematic analysis from interviews but are not formally included in the path analysis. Future work could expand this model with cohorts outside of Lipscomb University to investigate generalizability to broader contexts.