Since my last research progress report, we have completed a lot of our project. Dr. Lehr edited and produced the final version of our survey. Some questions that we added was listing the three most important reasons for choosing engineer as their major; what other majors or universities did they consider switching to; their thoughts on what a “good engineer” should entail; and how they perceive their position in engineering compared to their male counterparts. I have just finished typing up all the questions onto Survey Monkey but we still need to format some of the questions better and figure out the range of some of the questions (questions like: what year are you born, when did you graduate high school). Also, there is not that many question formats on Survey Monkey, so I had to make separate some questions within questions. We also may want to think about how much room we should allow them to write. I kept a lot at 50 words, but we may want to extend the amount.
We also completed the IRB (Institutional Review Board) forms for the Human Subjects Committee, since we are giving our survey out to Cal Poly students and need to get an approval before having subjects take the survey. In the IRB packet, we included the Human Subjects Protocol Approval Form, Informed Consent Form, Cover Page, and our Final Survey Draft.
For the Human Subjects Protocol Approval Form, we projected the duration to be a year-long (from February 2011 to February 2012). We also have to include possible risks and what measure will be taken to minimize those risks. We included that there may be minor psychological risks that may occur and provided consultation from either Helene Finger, the director of Women’s Engineering Program and also a researcher for this project, and also Cal Poly’s Counseling and Psychological Services. Also, possible incentives for participations may be a raffle to be entered to win prizes that may include campus gifts. We only need a “minimal review” since there’s no deception of the subjects involved and there are not a lot of risks involved in our study and subjects are remained anonymous and cannot be identified by the researchers.
For our Informed Consent Form, we made it clear to our participants the possible risks and the consultation. We also inform them that it will take 20 to 30 minutes long, except now I think we should change it to 25 to 35 because of the increase amount of questions. We also made it clear that they will remain anonymous throughout the whole study and will never be asked to provide their name.
Our cover page basically stated our purpose and methods. Our purpose is to assist Cal Poly’s Women’s Engineering Program with the recruitment and retention of female engineering students. WEP (Women’s engineering program) will supply the contact information for the female engineering majors in College of Engineering and also BioResource and Agricultural Engineering (BRAE) and Architectural Engineering (ARCE) that is in other colleges.
We are very close to being done with all the preparations to send out the survey. We just need to edit the survey layout a bit on SurveyMonkey.com. Also, we need to wait for the approval from the Human’s Subjects Committee to continue on in our research project.
This is a very interesting research project to me. I think that there are a lot of aspects that affect the retention of females in engineering, and being a part of SWE for the past three and a half years has really helped me to understand why there are so few women in engineering in going to conferences and other meetings with students and professionals around the country. At some of our outreach events, it’s interesting to see that some of the girls have outright said, “I can’t do that” without even having been doubted before the project. I think that because engineering has been so gendered at such a young age, and the way it has been recently advertised to students thinking of pursuing a degree in STEM fields, it would be very interesting to follow up this study with students transitioning from elementary school to junior high, or even third to fourth grade (specifically for me, I started science education in 4th grade for elementary school). This study will be very helpful and I look forward to seeing the results and hearing about them in the coming year. I would be interested in knowing more of what we have already on the topic—also if you have any predictions based on other similar research, it would be interesting to see changes from past studies that are similar to the current status with this study.
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