Development and Validation of Engineering Professional Moral Identity Measure.

Abstract

Engineering ethics education often emphasizes teaching reasoning skills while overlooking other influential dimensions on one’s ethical behavior – e.g., whether students see ethical responsibility as part of who they are as professionals. One of the challenges in integrating such overlooked dimensions in engineering ethics education is the limited resources in assessing student outcomes. To address this challenge, adapting a widely used moral identity scale to the engineering context, this paper introduces an initial development and validation effort of the Engineering Professional Moral Identity (EPMI) instrument, designed to assess the extent to which ethical responsibility is integrated into one’s identity as an engineer. Exploratory and confirmatory analyses were performed with survey data from 515 practicing engineers. Results supported a two-factor structure, internalization and symbolization, with an eight-item model. We argue that EPMI complements reasoning-focused measures by capturing the identity dimension of ethical development, which enables longitudinal tracking of students’ identity development and targeted instruction. Findings from this study provide initial validity evidence for EPMI and position the tool as a practical tool for assessing and cultivating identity-centered ethics education in engineering education.