2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The need for a common instrument for assessing engineering leadership development has grown as accreditation standards and engineering education more broadly emphasize holistic student development and outcomes. Programs worldwide struggle to evaluate their impact on engineering students’ leadership development, largely because of a lack of consensus on engineering-specific definitions of leadership and development strategies. Moreover, current instruments are often tailored to individual programs, limiting their generalizability and cross-context applicability.

To address these challenges, our work leverages the Contextual Engineering Leadership Development (CELD) framework and Q methodology to generate and reduce items. In our pilot research, we demonstrated the viability of Q methodology for exploring how engineering leaders prioritized 60 leadership statements, yielding three distinct viewpoints and 30 distinguishing statements. This process highlighted opportunities for improvement and the need for broader data collection.

In the present study, we expanded data collection via an online platform to include practicing engineers from diverse industries across North America, capturing a wide range of perspectives on engineering leadership. Our sample of practicing engineers (n = 27) varies by region, gender, race, and professional background, thereby providing a comprehensive understanding of how engineering leadership is perceived. We also conducted 10 think-aloud interviews to assess whether participants interpreted the 60 Q statements as intended, revising them as necessary. We collected data using the Q Method Software online platform, which facilitated Q sorts and the collection of survey data on participant demographics and professional experience. The data collected through Q Method Software was analyzed using KADE to perform a factor analysis of the Q sorts. The data analysis produced three composite Q sorts that capture participants' viewpoints of engineering leadership and allowed us to identify 30 distinguishing and 2 consensus statements. Distinguishing statements, shown by z-score differences, highlight unique perspectives, while consensus statements, with similar z-scores across viewpoints, indicate shared understanding. The statements were then leveraged in our item reduction process.

Alongside data collection, we developed a preliminary set of survey items for the 60 Q statements. Since each statement corresponds to an aspect of engineering leadership backed by existing bodies of literature, items were adapted from established survey instruments. To facilitate item reduction from the preliminary set of 464 survey items, we use the Q sorts results to eliminate statements and their corresponding survey items that do not align with distinguishing and consensus statements. Doing so ensures that the final instrument evaluates the constructs that are broadly important as well as those that define distinct engineering leadership viewpoints, while using the fewest possible items. Using this approach, we have narrowed our survey to 247 items, approximately 8 per distinguishing and consensus statement. Additional refinement is needed to reduce the number of items to our target range of 4 to 6 per Q statement, which is a practical range that allows us to test for item homogeneity. Following ongoing refinement and validation, this instrument will support refinement of the CELD framework and inform curriculum design, instructional strategies, and assessment practices, contributing to the preparation of future engineering leaders