Mapping Change in Professional Identity Growth in Doctoral Engineering Students

Abstract

While identity development in engineering students has attracted scholarly attention for over two decades, very little is known about the process of professional identity development in engineering doctoral students. This brief paper describes a research study that employs user-experience (UX) methods to identify critical change indicators in professional identity development. It focuses on journey mapping to track change processes in identity development and reports how the researchers’ use of journey mapping as a research method changed, oscillating between the collection of visual qualitative data to coded quantitative data and back again. It also discusses how this oscillation has required the research team to adopt various technologies to assist with the analysis and visualization of findings.