Measuring engineering culture: a preliminary approach using perceptions of meritocracy and competition

This work in progress paper aims to present a first effort in measuring elements of engineering culture that can interact with student well-being. Engineering culture has been under significant scrutiny during the last couple of decades, especially as it has been extensively documented to be exclusionary for marginalized groups. Significant and valuable efforts exist characterizing engineering culture qualitatively, however, less of such efforts have been oriented toward generating a quantitative approach to gauge it. Therefore, studies that aim to measure engineering culture often use established measures for diversity and inclusion as the closest proxies. Derived from our own need to have a quantitative way of measuring engineering culture within a larger longitudinal and multi-institutional project, we embarked on an attempt to do so through two components that have been documented as being part of the engineering ways of thinking and doing, the perceptions of meritocratic beliefs and competitive attitudes. In this paper, we present five items that we have used to measure engineering culture as they relate to competition and meritocracy beliefs. Our research goal was to use Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to investigate the factorial structure of the proposed items. We report on the results from the EFA and CFA for these items using a dataset with responses from more than one thousand students participating in a multi-institutional online survey. Preliminary results show a limited performance of the items in a two-factor structure. We report on a variety of performance measures including congruence measures. While the factor structure does not result reliable, the consistency of results across datasets provides a good step forward on this space of research. Due to the longitudinal nature of the larger project, we plan to iterate on this instrument, including additional aspects of engineering culture. We envision offering a starting point for the challenge of quantitatively gauging elements of engineering culture that have been documented to be problematic to the advancement of the field. Keywords-engineering culture, meritocracy, competition.