Background Social responsibility can motivate disaster relief nurses to devote themselves to safeguarding rights and interests of people when facing challenges that threaten public health. However, few studies focused on the relationship of moral courage, job-esteem, and social responsibility among disaster relief nurses. Objective To explore the influence of moral courage and job-esteem on the social responsibility in disaster relief nurses and clarify the relationship model between them. Methods A cross-sectional study was conducted among 716 disaster relief nurses from 14 (...) hospitals in central China through an online survey, including moral courage scale, job-esteem scale, and social responsibility questionnaire. The data were analyzed by Pearson’s correlation, and the mechanism of the effect of moral courage and job-esteem on social responsibility was completed. Ethical considerations This study was approved by the Medical Ethics Committee of the Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University (Approval Number: 2019016). Results Disaster relief nurses’ moral courage positively impacted social responsibility (r = 0.677, p < 0.01), and moral courage could affect social responsibility through the mediating role of job-esteem. Conclusion Job-esteem mediated between moral courage and social responsibility among disaster relief nurses. Nursing managers regular assessment of nurses’ moral courage and interventions such as meetings and workshops can reduce moral distress, foster morally courageous behavior, enhance job-esteem, and improve social responsibility performance among disaster relief nurses. (shrink)

This paper aims to review the empirical and theoretical research on engineering ethics education, by focusing on the challenges reported in the literature. The analysis is conducted at four levels of the engineering education system. First, the individual level is dedicated to findings about teaching practices reported by instructors. Second, the institutional level brings together findings about the implementation and presence of ethics within engineering programmes. Third, the level of policy situates findings about engineering ethics education in the context of (...) accreditation. Finally, there is the level of the culture of engineering education. The multi-level analysis allows us to address some of the limitations of higher education research which tends to focus on individual actors such as instructors or remains focused on the levels of policy and practice without examining the deeper levels of paradigm and purpose guiding them. Our approach links some of the challenges of engineering ethics education with wider debates about its guiding paradigms. The main contribution of the paper is to situate the analysis of the theoretical and empirical findings reported in the literature on engineering ethics education in the context of broader discussions about the purpose of engineering education and the aims of reform programmes. We conclude by putting forward a series of recommendations for a socio-technical oriented reform of engineering education for ethics. (shrink)

This work describes the perceptions that Industrial Engineering students have regarding Colombian firms’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. It also explores the incidence of gender, academic level, work experience and entrepreneurial intention on students’ vision. A survey with 70 CSR practices was designed based on previous research. Practices were grouped in ten dimensions: shareholders, customers, employees, suppliers, stakeholders, ethics, environment, legal, human rights and society. A representative sample of 142 students was used. Results show that students perceive a higher commitment (...) of Colombian companies with the shareholders dimension, while a lower with the society, ethics and environmental CSR practices. Work experience and entrepreneurial intention are the only variables affecting the identified perceptions. Thus, as they gain experience, their perceptions become more favorable. On the other hand, potential entrepreneurs have a more critical view on the companies’ commitment. Additionally, the fact that the academic level does not impact students’ perceptions constitutes a challenge for the academic program, since it is expected that this will affect the vision of future engineers. This is the first study that evaluates perceptions of Industrial Engineering students, who, given their object of study, will be responsible for designing and managing production processes in organizations of the future. Results respond to a specific context (students at a Colombian public university), therefore further research to explore the subject is recommended. (shrink)

Engineers should learn how to act on their responsibility to society during their education. At present, however, it is unknown what students think about the meaning of socially responsible engineering. This paper synthesizes 4 years of longitudinal interviews with engineering students as they progressed through college. The interviews revolved broadly around how students saw the connections between engineering and social responsibility, and what influenced these ideas. Using the Weidman Input–Environment–Output model as a framework, this research found that influences included required (...) classes such as engineering ethics, capstone design, and some technical courses, pre-college volunteering and familial values, co-curricular groups such as Engineers Without Borders and the Society of Women Engineers, as well as professional experiences through internships. Further, some experiences such as technical courses and engineering internships contributed to confine students’ understanding of an engineer’s social responsibility. Overall, students who stayed in engineering tended to converge on basic responsibilities such as safety and bettering society as a whole, but tended to become less concerned with improving the lives of the marginalized and disadvantaged. Company loyalty also became important for some students. These results have valuable, transferable contributions, providing guidance to foster students’ ideas on socially responsible engineering. (shrink)

AimOur study aimed to investigate the effect of social responsibility on the subjective well-being of volunteers for COVID-19 and to examine the mediating role of job involvement in this relationship.BackgroundNowadays, more and more people join volunteer service activities. As we all know, volunteer work contributes to society without any return. Volunteers often have a strong sense of social responsibility and reap subjective well-being in their dedication. Although research shows that social responsibility will drive them to participate in volunteer work actively, (...) it is less clear whether job involvement will impact their subjective well-being.MethodsThe data were collected in the precaution zone in Shanghai, China, from April to May 2022. A sample of 302 volunteers for COVID-19 completed the social responsibility scale, subjective well-being scale and job involvement scale in the form of an electronic questionnaire on their mobile phones. A structural equation model was adopted to verify the research hypotheses.ResultsSocial responsibility was significantly and positively related to volunteers’ subjective well-being and job involvement. Job involvement fully mediates the relationship between volunteers’ social responsibility and subjective well-being.ConclusionSocial responsibility is critical to predicting volunteers’ subjective well-being. Job involvement plays an intervening mechanism in explaining how social responsibility promotes volunteers’ subjective well-being. (shrink)

Informed by ABET accreditation criteria and broader societal needs, ethics has been emphasized as important for engineering professionals. Engineering students are thus exposed to professional ethics and related concerns throughout their college experiences both within and beyond the formal engineering curriculum, but little is known about what learning experiences and lessons engineering students view as most memorable and salient as they approach graduation. Therefore, this paper answers the following research questions: RQ1) What types of experiences do senior engineering students report (...) as salient learning experiences for their ethical and moral formation as they approach graduation? and RQ2) What do students learn from the most commonly discussed types of experiences? To address these questions, we conducted semi-structured interviews with senior engineering students and performed inductive thematic analysis on the resulting transcripts. Among various types of experiences that students reported as influencing their ethical and moral perspectives, this paper highlights work experiences, formal education, and family environment as the most frequently mentioned. Our results suggest that work experiences were especially significant for students’ learning of engineering ethics in a professional context, followed by academic experiences as a source of both professional/ethical and more general moral lessons. Many students also described family and friends as influential, especially as related to their general perceptions of morality. Based on these findings, a variety of educational implications are discussed. (shrink)

This paper explores how undergraduate students understood the social relevance of their engineering course content knowledge and drew broader social and ethical implications from that knowledge. Based on a three-year qualitative study in a junior-level engineering class, we found that students had difficulty in acknowledging the social and ethical aspects of engineering as relevant topics in their coursework. Many students considered the immediate technical usability or improved efficiency of technical innovations as the noteworthy social and ethical implications of engineering. Findings (...) suggest that highly-structured engineering programs leave little room for undergraduate students to explore the ethical dimension of engineering content knowledge and interact with other students/programs on campus to expand their “technically-minded” perspective. We discussed the issues of the “culture of disengagement” :42–72, 2014) fueled by disciplinary elitism, spatial distance, and insulated curriculum prevalent in the current structure of engineering programs. We called for more conscious effort by engineering educators to offer meaningful interdisciplinary engagement opportunities and in-class conversations on ethics that support engineering students' holistic intellectual growth and well-rounded professional ethics. (shrink)

The importance of ethics education for undergraduate engineering students has been emphasized due to the manifold impacts of engineering on society. However, little is known about moral disengagement among engineering students, which could potentially lead to unethical engineering practice. Especially, it is not known how engineering students’ moral disengagement changes over the course of their college studies. In this paper, we conducted a longitudinal, mixed-methods study to investigate moral disengagement among undergraduate engineering students (n = 274) using Bandura’s theory of (...) moral disengagement as a theoretical framework. We found engineering students’ overall propensity to morally disengage did not change over time, but there were statistically significant differences in student responses to three mechanisms of moral disengagement. We further investigated these findings with students’ interviews. Based on our results, we discuss various theoretical and practical implications. (shrink)