New Publication! A Flexible Guide for Using Ethnography + Grounded Theory: An Example From Studying A Research Team’s Decision-Making Culture

Abstract: The benefits of interdisciplinary research teams are well-known; however, there can be challenges due to differences in how disciplines approach knowledge construction. To better understand how interdisciplinary research teams navigate these differences in thinking, we used tools from ethnography to discover the cultural knowledge created and used by an engineering education research team and individuals on the team. We then used approaches from constructivist grounded theory to interpret these insights and transform them into a preliminary model of how interdisciplinary engineering education researchers navigate differences in thinking. This methodology paper outlines our process and the benefits of combining approaches from ethnography and constructivist grounded theory to simultaneously explore group culture and individual perceptions. We describe how and why we combined approaches from these two methodologies to develop our preliminary model. The aim of this paper is to provide an example of how qualitative researchers can be creative with their methodological approaches to comprehensively explore their social reality under investigation.

New Publication! "Investigating the Challenges of Adapting Quantitative Scales into an Engineering Education Context" International Journal of Engineering Education

Quantitative measures are important tools in engineering education research that often lack an ongoing and robust process of validation. Researchers may take a scale from one study and use it in another because it has been published as ‘‘validated’’ without gathering evidence for its use in the new context. Validation is particularly important when attempting to develop measures of abstract constructs. The purpose of this study is to illustrate the process and challenges of adapting quantitative scales into an engineering education context by presenting a case exploring the process of adapting a scale to measure engineering epistemic constructs. The outcomes of this study provide a basis for better understanding the challenges associated with scale adaptation and validation. This work also adds to knowledge around quantitatively measuring epistemic constructs in engineering and encourages our field to critically consider its value.