Why Would You Ask Me about Engineering Culture and Belonging? Introducing Social Science Prompts into Engineering Surveys

What happens when researchers introduce socially theorized concepts like "culture" into engineering surveys as data generation prompts? While it is common for us to use social science theories to frame our analyses, it is less common for us to ask engineering students and practitioners to make sense of them through electronically administered surveys. In this paper, we examine 1198 open-ended responses to two items on a Canadian engineering career path survey: Q65: What aspects of engineering culture make you feel like you belong? and Q66: What aspects of engineering culture cause you to question your belonging? In addition to identifying specific factors that enhanced and constrained participants' sense of belonging in the profession, we observed three distinct ways of responding to our culture prompt: engage (14%), ignore (54%), and backlash (8%). When we disaggregated these findings by an intersectional gender/race category, we found that white men were over- represented in "backlash" responses (11%), racialized men and women (76% RM, 71% RW) were over- represented in the "ignore" responses, and racialized and white women (23% RW, 20% WW) were over- represented in the "engage" responses. We use these findings to generate a justice-based argument for including social science prompts in engineering education research. Our position contrasts with positivist norms about minimizing response bias. When we minimize the ambiguity of survey prompts, we adopt a standard set by the white, male majority, leaving dominant ideology intact. In contrast, when we integrate social science concepts into our survey, we provide an opening for the "subaltern" to speak.