How do Engineers Experience Ethics in Practice?: A Phenomenographic Investigation of Engineers in the Health Products Industry.

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Learn more: PMC Disclaimer | PMC Copyright Notice Sci Eng Ethics . 2026 Apr 10;32(3):22. doi: 10.1007/s11948-026-00592-1 How do Engineers Experience Ethics in Practice?: A Phenomenographic Investigation of Engineers in the Health Products Industry Nicholas D Fila 1, # , Carla B Zoltowski 2, # , Justin L Hess 3 , Alison J Kerr 4 , Dayoung Kim 5 , Michael C Loui 6 , Andrew O Brightman 7, ✉ Author information Article notes Copyright and License information 1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA USA 2 Elmore Family School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN USA 3 School of Engineering Education, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN USA 4 Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, Colorado School of Mines, Golden, CO USA 5 Department of Engineering Education, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA USA 6 Grainger College of Engineering, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL USA 7 Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN USA ✉ Corresponding author. # Contributed equally. Received 2025 Mar 14; Accepted 2026 Mar 16; Issue date 2026. © The Author(s) 2026 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ . PMC Copyright notice PMCID: PMC13230234  PMID: 41963746 Abstract Ethics is an essential aspect of professional development in engineering and required for accreditation in engineering programs. Educators need to understand how engineers experience ethics in their engineering practice to align ethics education with work experiences. We addressed the research question, “What are the qualitatively different ways engineers experience ethical engineering practice in the health products industry?” We used phenomenography to collect and analyze 43 interviews with practicing engineers working in orthopedics, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals. This methodology assumes (1) there are qualitatively different ways of experiencing a phenomenon (ethical engineering practice) and (2) ways of experiencing are structurally related. This research identified six categories of ways of experiencing ethical engineering practice: Doing Right, Ensuring Integrity in Processes, Upholding Professional Responsibility, Understanding and Reconciling Perspectives, Negotiating and Using Judgment, and Stewarding Culture. The structural relationships among the categories were comprised of two dimensions of variation: Understanding the System and Understanding Role and Responsibility. The findings provide a more comprehensive understanding of the varied ways to experience ethical engineering in industry practice and thus have potential to inform ethics education in engineering programs and in workforce training. Keywords: Ethics, Phenomenography, Engineering profession, Workplace culture, Health products industry Introduction Ethics education is an important aspect of preparing future engineers for professional practice. Educators have used various pedagogical approaches to teach ethics to new engineers (Hess & Fore, 2018 ; Hess et al., 2023b ; Polmear et al., 2025 ), but these approaches are often based only on academic perspectives (e.g., Schwartz, 2016 ; Kim, 2022 ). Industry workforce training and management strategies are essential to creating ethical cultures for industries where engineers are employed (Gkeredakis et al., 2024 ). To align instructional approaches with the actual ethics challenges engineers face in industry practice, we need to understand the experiences of ethical engineering in their industries (Swiestra & Jelsma, 2006 ; Bairaktarova & Woodcock, 2017 ; Zhu & Jesiek, 2017 ; Trevelyan, 2019 ; Nair & Bulleit, 2020 ; Smith et al., 2021 ; Stukes et al., 2023 ; Boyd et al., 2025 ). Few studies have investigated the ethics experiences of engineers in actual practice. Recently, Smith and colleagues ( 2021 ) investigated the experiences of engineers in the mining and energy industry, acknowledging that “[c]orporate contexts often provide more concrete and immediate guidance for engineers than do codes of ethics.” (Smith et al., 2021 , p. 27). In their conclusion, they argued for realigning ethics education with the roles that ethics has in professional practice. Aligning ethics education with professional practice is complicated by variance across disciplines and industries and within distinct industrial settings. Ethical engineering is a complex phenomenon that is further complicated by the industry context in which it occurs (Chameau et al., 2014 ; Gkeredakis et al., 2024 ). Engineers working in different fields often experience different ethical issues and respond to different ethical norms (Borsen, 2025 ). Engineers in industry also have varied roles and work in multiple areas such as research, development, production, quality, and regulatory affairs, as well as in marketing and management. Engineers’ experiences with engineering ethics may be greatly informed by their role responsibilities and tensions therein (Smith et al., 2021 ). Ethics and compliance officers have observed, through surveys and other tracking, differences in the ways individuals and distinct sub-cultures in these different areas respond to ethics trainings and compliance activities (Kaptein, 2015 ; Dedeke, 2019 ; Kim & Jesiek, 2023 ). Therefore, we need to understand both the industry specific context in which engineers will be practicing and the variation of experience within that context to develop relevant ethics education and training. While the need for understanding industry-specific experiences of ethical engineering exists for most industries, the potential for harm in the health products industry makes it an especially important industry to study (Maron & Hauser, 2007 ; Huebner, 2014 ; Kessel, 2014 ; Brightman et al., 2019 ; Corfmat et al., 2025 ). Due to this inherent risk of direct harm, the health products industry is highly regulated for both safety, i.e., non-maleficence, and effectiveness, i.e., beneficence (Suhag, 2024 ). Engineers in the health products industry must understand the needs, challenges, and perspectives of clinical partners and patients if they are to provide products that reduce, rather than exacerbate, human suffering. Otherwise, they risk increasing potential harm to patients or at least decreasing the quality of clinical care (Ball et al., 2018 ). In addition, the complexity of health technologies, the increasing demand for new technologies, and the rapid rate of innovation lead to new and challenging ethical issues which often outpace regulations (Eaton & Kennedy, 2007 ; Ross et al., 2008 ; Brightman et al., 2019 ). In light of these complex ethics challenges, we propose that a study of the actual ethical experiences of engineers in the health products industry will enable us to develop an empirically grounded and industry-specific understanding of ethical engineering in this industry. Further, based on the potential for variation of experience based on personal and contextual factors, this study employed phenomenography, a qualitative research methodology (Bowden & Green, 2005 ; Marton & Booth, 1997 , Åkerlind 2024 , 2025 ), to elucidate variation in ways engineers experience ethics in their work and the structural relationship among those varied experiences. Such an understanding will guide development of content and strategies for engineering ethics education, workforce training, and management strategies that are aligned with actual workplace experiences. In our study, we addressed the research question, “What are the qualitatively different ways engineers experience ethical engineering practice in the health products industry?” Aligned with this phenomenographic approach, we did not begin with a particular a priori way of understanding ethical engineering as expressed by a theoretical or conceptual framework. Instead, we allowed the understanding of ethical engineering practice to emerge from the data, guided by participant accounts of their experiences and the variation identified therein. Research Design Methodology Phenomenography aims to uncover the variation in people’s ways of experiencing, or understanding, phenomena in the world and the structural relationships among them (Åkerlind, 2025 ). Phenomenographic research is guided by non-dualist (i.e., relational) ontology in which the object of study is the relationship between a phenomenon and the person experiencing that phenomenon (Åkerlind, 2025 )., The relationship is characterized by both the meanings associated with the experiences and the structured (i.e., logical) ways in which they are related. Another aspect of this relationship is a focus on the collective experience “across the participant group as a whole, with the different understandings constituted in relation to each other, not independently” (Åkerlind, 2024 , p. 11). The results of phenomenographic analysis include categories of description (i.e., distinct, composite ways of experiencing the phenomenon), dimensions of variation (i.e., foundational and functional aspects of the variation), and an outcome space that represents structural relationships between categories, which are often hierarchical in nature (Marton & Booth, 1997 ). Although the dimensions of variation can be identified independently, when they are identified in a “structurally related way along common themes of meaning, [they are] called ‘themes of expanding awareness’” (Åkerlind 2025 , p. 184). In this case, in addition, the outcome space includes themes that represent the logical relationship among the dimensions of variation. The themes become more comprehensive along the dimension of variation, which reflect structural relationships that are hierarchical. According to Åkerlind ( 2024 ), the structural relationship between understandings in a hierarchically structured outcome space is actually one of inclusivity , in the sense that understandings higher in the hierarchy have been placed there because they include awareness of understandings lower in the hierarchy, but not vice versa. Because they are inclusive, understandings higher in the hierarchy are inevitably more complex than those lower in the hierarchy, and this increased complexity is seen as enabling more flexible and powerful ways of operating in the world. (Marton, 1994 ; Marton & Booth, 1997 , p. 6) Unlike other research methodologies, phenomenography does not start with a theoretical or conceptual framework for the investigated phenomenon. Instead, a phenomenographic study seeks to describe the participants’ experiences of the phenomenon in their own terms. Phenomenography has been used to explore complex phenomena in engineering and engineering education (Beagon & Bowe, 2023 ; Daly et al., 2012 ; Dringenberg & Purzer, 2018; Zoltowski et al., 2012 ). Participant Recruitment and Consent We documented participant consent through a recruitment survey approved by our institutional review board. The survey was distributed to representative companies in three sectors of the health products industry: orthopedics, pharmaceuticals, and medical devices. Company representatives then shared a university-approved recruitment email with prospective participants. The start of the survey provided the study consent form: 110 participants completed this survey. Since we used the survey only to recruit participants for a qualitative research study, the survey response rate is irrelevant. Participant Overview While this phenomenographic study was not designed to evaluate differences among demographic variables, we were aware that demographic variables may influence ways of experiencing ethical engineering practice (Rudnicka et al., 2013 ). Accordingly, we sought coverage of several variables that we collected during the survey: disciplinary training, industry sub-field, work role, frequency of encountering ethical issues, highest education degree, years of engineering experience, years in current field, age, gender, and race/ethnicity. We sought equal distribution across three sectors (orthopedics, pharmaceuticals, medical devices). We sought to diversify participants based on race, gender, disciplinary training, and work experience. Forty-three individuals were interviewed for this study. Thirty participants identified as male and 13 identified as female. Participants who reported their race were White ( n = 31), Asian ( n = 5), Black ( n = 3), and multi-racial ( n = 2). Most participants ( n = 39) received their education in the United States. Four received their education in other countries. Their highest levels of education were doctoral degree = 8, master’s degree = 18, bachelor’s degree = 15, some college = 2. Participants reported 1–43 years of experience in engineering, with an average (Mean) of 14.8 years (Standard Deviation = 12.0). Some participants had experience in other industries, so the number of years of experience in their current field (health products industry) was lower, with a maximum of 34 years and an average of 11.7 years. There was parity between each industry sector: 15 participants worked in medical devices, 14 in orthopedics, and 14 in pharmaceuticals. All the participants were currently working in the United States, although nine had practiced outside the United States. The participants reported encountering ethical issues in the pre-survey at the following frequencies: every day = 12, at least weekly = 7, at least monthly = 14, less than monthly = 6, never = 1, not sure = 1, other = 2. Data Collection To collect experiences with ethical engineering practice, we conducted semi-structured phenomenographic interviews (Green, 2005 ), which each lasted approximately 90 min. After initial background questions, we asked, “Can you describe an experience you have had with ethics in engineering?” Participants generally discussed two ethical experiences, each comprising roughly 25 min of the interview (see Appendix for the interview protocol). Three interviewers led interviews for each company type. Two interviewers had used phenomenography in previous research in engineering education. The third interviewer was an experienced qualitative researcher and was trained to conduct phenomenographic interviews by the two experienced phenomenographers. Each interviewer also conducted at least one pilot interview prior to beginning interview collection herein; these pilot interviews also enabled us to collectively finalize the data collection protocol. To promote common interview experiences for participants, we developed interview heuristics, i.e., common strategies for interviewers to employ while identifying follow-up questions and progressing through sections of the interview. After every interview, the interviewer drafted a memo to document what went well and what could be improved in subsequent interviews. The team then met weekly to discuss these memos and to discuss any challenges or suggestions for improvement. Finally, nearly every interview was conducted online using video conferencing software; only a few participants chose an in-person interview. The interviews were recorded, and the audio recordings were transcribed verbatim. Data Analysis Our analysis involved iterative holistic reviews of transcripts (Åkerlind, 2005 ), that were team-based (Brightman et al., 2018 ; Fila et al., 2019 ), to discover the qualitatively different ways ethical engineering was experienced by our participants. The analysis involved iterating among seven distinct steps (see Fig. 1 ). Fig. 1. Open in a new tab Analysis Process First, we reviewed transcripts to gauge content and scope participants’ experiences and perspectives. Second, we grouped transcripts into preliminary categories based on a holistic analysis of each transcript and its similarity with other transcripts. Third, we re-read each transcript to compare it with other transcripts in its category. Fourth, we described each category based on common and salient content of transcripts comprising the category. Fifth, we reconsidered our categorization of individual transcripts based on their alignment with current categories. We identified core transcripts (which fit well with the category) and border transcripts (which contained substantive misalignments or aligned well with multiple categories) to clarify category descriptions and boundaries. Sixth, we identified structured relationships among categories along the themes of expanding awareness (see phenomenography section for the detailed description). Finally, we critiqued categories and their relationships by soliciting perspectives from team members and our research advisory team of experts. All seven authors participated in all analysis steps. Analysis was iterative and thus involved moving back and forth between different steps, as we repeatedly refined and reformulated the categories. Typically, one author would take the lead in building/describing categories and describing relationships for a pre-determined period. The author would then present categories and/or relationships to the team for discussion and critique. Based on questions and new understandings generated at these meetings, a different author would take the lead for the next period. In the end, we generated an outcome space of ethical engineering practice that included (1) the variation of ways of experiencing ethical engineering practice, and (2) a hierarchical structure depicting the relationships among the categories. Validation Considerations To promote research quality, we followed the Q 3 framework of Walther et al. ( 2013 ), employing five types of validation checks: theoretical validation, procedural validation, communicative validation, pragmatic validation, and process reliability. See Table 1 . For details, refer to Fila et al. (2019) . Table 1. Validation Types and Accompanying Approaches Validation Aspect Making Data Considerations Handling Data Considerations Theoretical validation • Large, diverse sample • Deep, experiential interview focus • Large, interdisciplinary team analysis Procedural validation • Four interviewers • Pilot interviews and team discussions of protocol • Check bias in developing interview protocol and question asking • Seven analysts • Full dataset immersion • Mutual trust in team • Check bias during data analysis Communicative validation • Transparent and empathic relationship • Multi-stakeholder, multi-setting critique and feedback Pragmatic validation • Participant recruitment locations • Experiential interview focus • Multi-stakeholder, multi-setting critique and feedback Process reliability • Screening survey • Rigorous interview protocol • Reflection memos and discussion • Interview heuristics • Open discussion and negotiation • Phenomenography facilitators Open in a new tab Prominent validation aspects of our approach focused on maximally uncovering variation in health products engineers’ ways of experiencing ethical engineering practice. These aspects included selecting participants to promote coverage of the potential range of ways of experiencing the phenomenon of ethical engineering practice; collecting authentic and comprehensive accounts of participants’ experiences with and relationships to the phenomenon; analyzing data holistically; and continually collecting feedback and iterating to ensure that emergent findings accurately reflected the data and were understandable to others. The seven authors of this paper brought perspectives from multiple disciplines, including biomedical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, engineering education, and industrial organizational psychology, and represented a broad range of academic standing, including a graduate student, a post-doctoral fellow, a research associate, an assistant professor, an associate professor, and a full professor. The author team also represented multiple gender, cultural, and national perspectives, and brought variable levels of expertise regarding ethics and ethical decision-making in engineering. Several team members have some level of industry experience, and one had expertise directly relevant to health products. Each of the seven authors contributed substantively to this team-based approach and our diverse disciplinary and research training made our team approach both challenging and effective (see Fila et al., 2019 ) for additional details regarding our collaborative research journey. Findings Analysis of the data yielded a two-dimensional outcome space consisting of six categories of description representing the qualitatively distinct ways of experiencing ethical engineering practice in the health products industry and the structural relationship among them. The categories of description and the pseudonyms of the participants whose experiences contributed to each category are given in Table 2 . After discussing each category in detail with illustrative quotes and explanations of key differences between the categories, we will introduce the two-dimensional outcome space. Table 2. Categories of Description Categories Ethical engineering practice is…. Category A: Doing Right …doing the right thing in the right way, as right (versus wrong) actions tend to be clear, and doing no harm is a primary concern. … reporting data accurately; correctly following rules, guidelines, and standard procedures, and complying with regulations without questioning, even when it is inconvenient or difficult. …seeking guidance and passing responsibility to others when the work is outside their expertise or responsibilities (based on the experiences described by Alisha, Blank, Henry, Jake, James, Jane, Rich) Category B: Ensuring Integrity in Processes … ensuring there is integrity and quality within the process in addition to the outcome. … interpreting guidelines, standards, and regulations and understanding the purpose of process to know what the right thing is to do. …holding themself and each other accountable to right practices and principles and doing what they said they would do. … an emerging awareness that some trade-offs between technical and business values of the company have to be made and will have impact. (based on the experiences described by Charlie, Cooper, Dunes, Gene, Raider, Sophia, William, Mustang) Category C: Upholding Professional Responsibility …upholding professional responsibility to the public, society, environment, and others more generally, especially to the safety of patients, despite ambiguities in the regulations, uncertainties in the data, and risks in the outcomes, by relying primarily on technical and professional knowledge. …a critical awareness of, and often frustration with, the interdependence and tensions within the organizational context. …requires questioning and challenging decisions among managerial, business, regulatory, and engineering (as technical) priorities at all stages of product life cycle and standing firm on engineering principles. (based on the experiences described by Asics, Carl, Carpathian, Eddie, Gary, George, Grace, Hank, Iowa, Jordan, Maya, Taz, Luke) Category D: Understanding and Reconciling Perspectives …seeking to understand why they are doing what they are doing, and that they are doing the right thing for the right reasons. …seeking to resolve uncertainty by appealing to the knowledge and perspectives of others while at the same time reconciling these with an internal perspective (moral compass) and emotions. …a recognition of the need to always be in a learning mode and that perspectives can change. …seeking to convince oneself, and often others, of the logical, rational, and acceptable ethical path, and when disagreements or conflicts arise to push back or accept that it is not their role to dissent. (based on the experiences described by Cy, Nathan, Pete, Rachel, Smoke) Category E: Negotiating and Using Judgment …using professional judgment and purposefully negotiating with multiple stakeholders to achieve the overall best outcome for patients and for the company within a global regulatory environment and integrated industry ecosystem. …doing their best to balance decision criteria with risks. …recognizing that it is not possible to make something completely safe, and that the complexity and uncertainty of ethical decisions require collective wisdom and negotiation for a best outcome. (based on the experiences described by Chesterton, Dick, Eric, Ferrari, Johnny, Sarah) Category F: Stewarding Culture …stewarding an organizational culture that supports collaborative ethical decision-making within a highly complex ecosystem of industry, clinics, and government. …ensuring the culture is open to improvements by inviting trust-based communication and encouraging learning from failure. …shaping this culture by being exemplars and by ensuring all relevant stakeholder perspectives are invited and considered to ensure best ethical choices are made. (based on the experiences described by Angela, Anthony, Elizabeth, Walter) Open in a new tab Category A: Doing Right In Category A, ethical engineering meant doing the right thing in the right way, generally guided by the principle of doing no harm. Engineers appealed to (and rarely questioned) regulations, guidelines, procedures, and values to guide their actions, such as by “following the regulations and guidelines” (Alisha), “be[ing] as honest as possible” (Henry), “always do[ing] the right thing” (Jane), “doing the right thing and being morally correct” (Alisha), “documenting our results correctly” (Jane), and “not being biased in decision-making” (Rich). They felt there was a clear right way to complete tasks, and it was their individual responsibility to always do this, even if doing so was inconvenient or difficult. With a primary concern of doing no harm, these engineers felt a need to act ethically, particularly because their work affected other people, especially patients. As Harry said, There’s always those things where you look at some numbers and you say if I would just put them down slightly different it would make my life a whole lot easier for this project, but it’s really the ethical thing to do. And the right thing to do is just try to report it as accurately as you can. […] I have to think about patient safely that what I’m doing right now could possibly harm a patient. - Henry Although these engineers rarely referenced stakeholders in the broader health products ecosystem beyond patients, they felt their employers communicated and supported a patient-centric value and provided protocols for aligned approaches, as illustrated by Alisha: As a part of our job and company values, you’re always told patient safety comes first, do what is right, follow the rules […] and the regulations. – Alisha Engineers sought guidance and passed responsibility to others when tasks were outside their expertise or responsibilities, such as Jake who described a process he oversaw: I could’ve disregarded [the issue] and said, “According to the protocol, it’s probably not a big deal. You can move on and do the original testing.” However, I then brought it to our quality engineer, someone that is more knowledgeable of the failure modes that we experience and the potential harmful effects of those. - Jake Outside of their own internal conflicts, engineers in Category A rarely mentioned experiencing conflict with their employers’ values or questioning the ethics of others. Category B: Ensuring Integrity in Processes In Category B, ethical engineering practice involved ensuring integrity throughout engineering processes. As in Category A, doing the right thing the right way remained important, but engineers in Category B recognized that guidelines, standards, and regulations required interpretation and justification to realize their intentions. In addition, engineers in Category B noticed their interdependence with others and emphasized the integrity of processes. Sophia described a desire to follow regulations alongside an awareness of their ambiguity: We have procedures and we also have our regulatory requirements that drive our works every day. So [I] try to be very conservative in reading those requirements because a lot of times, they are gray… they are not always specific in telling you what to do. - Sophia Engineers perceived integrity as including aspects of trustworthiness, such as doing what they agreed to do (e.g., regulatory requirements), both as individuals and the company. Gene noted an interdependence between people in ensuring integrity in a situation where a surgery product didn’t work and required a re-surgery: It just grieves us, yet integrity, our ethical basis, to do what we say we were going to do, says we take that seriously. We go back. We get data. We send people out to visit a physician’s office, to gather information to try to ascertain, ‘Okay, what did go wrong here?’ and to walk through that. - Gene Engineers described the need to help others understand the guidelines, standards, and regulations and hold each other accountable. These engineers reported how others within the organization helped them act with integrity. For example, Cooper stressed interdependent accountability: I think a big part of it is kind of an interdependent culture. For me personally, when I’m going into the room usually someone else is in there too, one of the operations staff, maybe a quality person. Typically, it’s operations staff that are more attuned to this practice, and they’re known to speak up and help. If I start walking towards somewhere and I don’t have my hairnet on, somebody will stop you […] It’s not like you consciously decide to forget to put a hairnet on. You wanna make that decision proactively, not reactively. But other people will help you be proactive as well. – Cooper Accountability for others was evident in Raider’s description of the importance of aligning varying understandings of standards and expectations to ensure integrity and quality of processes regardless of geographical location. As Raider said, “As a company, we expect our sites outside the United States to follow the same safety standards that we do in the US, so that sometimes can be a little difficult.” Although these engineers generally accepted the processes, even if requiring some interpretation, they differed from engineers in Category A in that they described an emerging awareness that some trade-offs between technical and business values and the need for individual steadfastness. As William said, “Typically, the business side wants to get the product out quicker. […] You’ve got to have a strong personality to say, ‘No, I’m not comfortable with this. We need to do this additional testing before we can move forward.’”. Category C: Upholding Professional Responsibility In Category C, ethical practice involved upholding one’s professional engineering responsibility to the public, society, environment, and others. As in Categories A and B, engineers in Category C sought patient safety by complying with regulations, but with greater awareness of uncertainties and risks. These engineers generally applied technical and professional expertise to this end, but they often discussed broader societal concerns, such as potential impacts to “the public” and the environment. Compared with Category B, the engineers in Category C experienced ethics beyond acting with integrity. They took professional responsibility to apply technical expertise to manage risks. While engineers in Category B recognized conflicts between technical and business values, engineers in Category C felt frustrated by these conflicts. Despite their desire to uphold professional responsibility, they described uncertainty and risk they experienced in relation to ethical actions, and they considered these ethical issues throughout product lifecycles. Asics demonstrated the desire to uphold professional responsibility and to manage risks throughout the product life cycle: You can’t eliminate risk, but are you consciously looking, “Have we mitigated this? Have we limited or at least understood what the risk is with whatever I’m engineering?” Engineering, in general, is building something […] but have I thought about the life cycle product of it? What are people gonna do when they throw this away? Is it going to hurt our environment? What are people going to do if it malfunctions? – Asics Engineers emphasized the importance of technical competence for being an ethical engineer. Their ethical approach prioritized both procedural integrity, as in Category B, and technical competence. They performed conscientious engineering analysis that ensured ethical outcomes given operational constraints and uncertainty. This required them to work within, and even expand, their technical expertise; adhere to sound mathematical, scientific, and data analytic practices; comprehensively understand the variation and risks in the patient context; and thoroughly scrutinize methodology and results. They relied on technical rationales and data when they justified and defended their decisions, such as highlighted by Hank: Science is never really cut, dry, and clean. You get new information every day and you need to react, or response [sic] to that in kind. In addition to that, a whole new piece of testing equipment was released and available to us that added a degree of freedom to what we have been doing, and things like that can have huge influences on outcomes, at least in bench testing. – Hank. Engineers demonstrated critical awareness of, and often frustration with, tensions within the organizational context among managerial, business, regulatory, and technical priorities. Nontechnical priorities (e.g., deadlines, cost requirements, resistance from management, and pressures from external stakeholders) required them to question and challenge decisions and stand firm on engineering principles. Carpathian described balancing elements in his practice: I’ve had plenty of experiences where we see multiple outcomes and have to discuss and prove to others that the one that we’re seeing is the best one to take, for whether it’s for business or ethical purposes. – Carpathian Engineers expressed responsibility to not only their patients, but also unique professional responsibilities as engineers to the public. As Luke said, “We [engineers] do have a special responsibility because a lot of times we’re responsible for ensuring the safety of a product and ensuring that a product is gonna perform as intended.” Similarly, Iowa said, “If we can’t trust engineers, then we literally can’t trust our infrastructure. We can’t trust the people who are supposed to be making our modern quality of life happen.” Category D: Understanding and Reconciling Perspectives In Category D, engineers sought to understand why they were doing what they were doing. Compared with Category B, engineers in Category D had a heightened sense of their personal “moral compass” and the need to consider and reconcile multiple perspectives to reach the best outcome. Like Category C, engineers in Category D were often frustrated by conflicts within their organizations. When opinions conflicted, engineers in Category C appealed to professional principles, whereas engineers in Category D appealed to the knowledge and perspectives of others, then reconciling these with their own internal perspectives and emotions—their moral compass. For example, Nathan shared: It’s helpful to be open and able to talk to others to get it out and hear multiple viewpoints and opinions on it, especially when you’re in a gray zone. I guess doing the right thing, it’s almost like a gut instinct, where you just know. – Nathan These engineers continually assessed the extent to which they were doing the right thing for the right reasons. Cy shared an experience with a manager, wherein he felt a need to understand “exactly why this was happening” and to be confident “that we were following all the rules, of both our company but also external laws and external regulations of the FDA or other regulatory bodies.” After he came to “understand the full story” he indicated that he would “do anything I can to help make this happen.” These engineers recognized the importance of technical competence, but because of their emphasis on learning and orientation to others’ perspectives , when they described how to appropriately respond to situations where they lacked the technical expertise or a broader perspective, they often expressed a humble recognition of their own limitations and imperative to seek out others. Smoke said, “I don’t think any one person sees every side of every situation.” Nathan similarly stated: It’s important for engineers to know what they don’t know. When you realize what does that mean, I guess it means you realize that you aren’t technically competent in that area. You speak up and you either let somebody know that you need help in that area, or you don’t comment, or you defer to somebody else. - Nathan Engineers experienced challenges incorporating perspectives outside of their engineering area. When disagreements arose, these engineers sought to convince themselves, and often others, of the logical, rational, and acceptable ethical path. If disagreements remained, then they pushed back or convinced themselves that the decision was ethically acceptable. Rachel described one such dilemma, which forced her to weigh patient needs, company interests, and her own moral priorities while recognizing a team ethos. She shared, “I’m going to make sure that I uphold the patient but at the same time uphold the company… I also think at the same time above all else your mindset goes above all of that.” Thus, it was important to know and feel one was doing the right thing after satisfactorily questioning and understanding an event. Category E: Negotiating and Using Judgement In Category E, ethical engineering practice required negotiating with multiple stakeholders and making difficult decisions using judgment to achieve the overall best outcome for patients and company within the global regulatory environment. While engineers in Category C viewed their roles as limited to advocating for technical values, engineers in Category E took responsibility to engage multiple stakeholders and to reach acceptable decisions that balanced multiple objectives. While engineers in Category D tried to reconcile conflicts between internal and external values to find the best decision, engineers in Category E recognized that often there is no single best solution, and that negotiation is required to reach collective judgments. Engineers in Category E perceived much more complexity and dynamism within engineering situations and considered organizational systems to a greater degree than engineers in prior categories. As Ferrari stated: [Ethical engineering practice] is being thoughtful of your actions and how they impact, from the individual to society, understanding all those interactions, from, “Is that individual bit of medicine safe for that single patient?” versus, “Are all the waste streams coming out of my plant impactful to the environment?” So, ethical engineering is considering your impact across that full spectrum. – Ferrari Engineers perceived ethical engineering challenges as irreducible to a single or “right” solution. They considered trade-offs while striving for the best possible outcomes. They balanced decision-making criteria with risks whilst recognizing that it is impossible to ensure perfection, e.g., the complete safety of a device or process. As a result, decision-making required judgment and negotiation. As Chesterton stated: I was exposed to a lot of opportunities to make judgment calls on designs that would eventually be used by human beings that could put them in a certain risk factor, or injury, or life-threatening situations. That was forefront in my mind at all times, but the counterbalance to that in the engineering world is, you have deadlines, you have competitive cost pressures, manufacturing cost pressures. You’re always looking for that balance. That truly does come into an ethical question as to how good is good, what’s good enough, and those kind of gray areas where there’s no clear, previously plowed ground that you can stand on […] You’re creating new territory. - Chesterton In response to this increased complexity and uncertainty (“grayness”), these engineers sought to understand issues as thoroughly as possible and to involve as many stakeholders as necessary before making any final decisions. Like prior categories, these engineers sought colleagues to better understand potential responses, chains of events, and outcomes. These engineers were acutely aware of how their roles and responsibilities supported ethical practice, sought diverse opinions, and recognized how each role and stakeholder contributed positively to achieving ethical outcomes. For example, Eric said, All of our instructions for use, all of our design, our risk management activities, our change control, our quality system, all of those things are reviewed by somebody in those departments, and then usually they’re signed off by management in those departments. It’s a pretty involved process and I think … Sometimes that’s frustrating for people working in the industry because change is very slow and very calculated, and then sometimes it could take a long time for things to change, because you have to involve so many people and so many stakeholders. - Eric Finally, Sarah described the important role of negotiating with people with very different opinions, both within her company organization and with regulators from several other countries as related to views of patient safety: The end goal with regulators is the same as ours. We want to help people and keep them safe. The problem with keeping people safe and ethics in general is that it is somewhat subjective, and what they think is necessary to keep people safe is perhaps different from what we do. – Sarah Category F: Stewarding Culture Engineers in Category F experienced ethical engineering practice in terms of a dynamic organizational culture that supported critical ethical decision-making within the highly complex and global ecosystem of the health products industry. Like Category E, engineers in Category F sought to cultivate ethical decision-making by involving and balancing multiple criteria, risks, benefits, and diverse stakeholders’ perspectives, which often differed across contexts (e.g., unique patient groups or global regulatory systems). For these engineers, the ongoing interplay of many perspectives was beneficial for making challenging ethical decisions. In addition, engineers in Category F recognized that various dynamic, divergent, and complex interconnected components of organizational ecosystems needed to be well-managed to ensure that the organization included all voices make collective decisions. As Walter said, Every day in the development of our new products, and the development of technologies to be applied to those products, you’re trying to answer this question about whether or not something is going to be ultimately safe and efficacious for a patient to get put into their body. […] What’s the evidence that you have that justifies why you think this is going to be okay? And that’s an engineering question. That’s also an ethics question. […] It’s a complex question. And one which really requires, first of all, very thoughtful consideration, thoughtful interaction with your peers and others, to try to reach what you believe to be is—I won’t say the “right” answer because… sometimes I’m not sure that there is really a right answer […] And that’s why we had, in this case, a broad team of medical doctors, practitioners, to help us make that trade-off decision, to decide just how should that device be designed to deal with that… So, I think that it’s inevitably a collective conversation, right? I think the “we” is important. I think the diversity of points of view is important. - Walter Engineers felt it was their role and responsibility to ensure that their organizational culture enabled individuals to practice ethical engineering through open, honest dialogue. To this end, they served as exemplars by mentoring and supporting others, fostering trust, and bringing people together. Angela, for example, felt it was her role to cultivate a patient-focused, fair, action-oriented, and open-minded culture within her leadership team by acting in ways aligned with important organizational and personal values. I feel, in a position of leadership, people look to you to be that example of ethical behavior. So, I don’t know that I can say definitively something that I do is not based in ethics… I think people look to leadership as being the example of how they should handle situations or really how the company handles situations, both from the standpoint of being fair and being challenged hearing the ideas of others, acting with urgency, acting in a patient’s best interest. - Angela In summary, while engineers in Category E negotiated and balanced the social and technical aspects of their organizations, engineers in Category F took responsibility for creating and stewarding an inclusive organizational culture by valuing, promoting, and acting upon the contributions of all organization members. The Outcome Space The six categories could be mapped onto a two-dimensional outcome space as shown in Fig. 2 . The two dimensions of the outcome space (Dimension 1: Understanding the System, and Dimension 2: Understanding Role and Responsibility) represent distinct but interrelated orientations of the engineers to the system: perceptual orientation and relational orientation respectively. Fig. 2. Open in a new tab Outcome Space of Ethical Engineering Practice in Health Products The “Understanding the System” dimension represents the different and more comprehensive ways that the engineers experienced aspects of and understood the complexity of the system. The “Understanding Role and Responsibility” dimension represents the way engineers engaged with the system and the degree to which they experienced the agency to modify it. The labels along these dimensions are ordinal and emerged from the data. Perceptual orientation represents the aspects of the system with which engineers regularly engaged. Engineers in Category A demonstrated an orientation toward protocols : they focused on the regulations, guidelines, and procedures that they were obligated to follow. For engineers in Category B, protocols remained important, but they demonstrated an orientation toward processes : they strove to ensure integrity in the processes of interpreting regulations, meeting promises, assisting peers, and holding each other accountable. Engineers in Categories C and D demonstrated a greater awareness of uncertainties and risks and an orientation toward the perspectives of other individuals in ethical decision-making than those in Categories A and B. When confronted with conflicting perspectives, those in Category C prioritized their technical expertise and professional responsibilities, whereas those in Category D relied more on their internal moral compass, to resolve conflicts. Engineers in Category E perceived much more complexity and dynamism within engineering situations and considered organizational systems to a greater degree than engineers in prior categories and viewed the workplace context as an integrated ecosystem: they integrated the perspectives of a wider range of relevant stakeholders in negotiating solutions to ethical problems. Finally, engineers in Category F demonstrated a more complex industry ecosystem which included other companies, regulatory agencies, clinical institutions, and professional societies. The relational orientation dimension represents the way engineers engaged with the system and the degree to which they experienced the agency to modify it. Engineers in Categories A and B demonstrated an accepting orientation: they followed extant procedures and fulfilled their roles in their relationships with peers and managers. By contrast, engineers in Categories C and D demonstrated a questioning orientation: they sought to understand the perspectives of those with whom they disagreed as they navigated through tensions within the system, such as conflicts between technical and business values. Finally, engineers in Categories E and F demonstrated a cultivating orientation: they felt agentic in negotiating with other individuals and in shaping the organizational culture. The outcome space is nearly hierarchical, as categories in the larger circles (Fig. 2 ) generally demonstrated elements of preceding categories in the smaller circles and integrated new elements to form a distinct and expanded way of experiencing ethical engineering practice. However, we emphasize that Categories C and D are equally comprehensive. In other words, these categories each incorporate “Questioning” and “Perspectives,” but these aspects manifest in distinct ways. Discussion In this study, we identified six categories of ways of experiencing ethical engineering in the health products industry and described the differences between categories along two dimensions of variation. Here we discuss how these findings further our understanding of engineering ethics in industry practice and the potential implications for aligning ethics education and training with this increased awareness. Additionally, we discuss how these findings can support engineers in the health products industry to engage with ethics in their engineering practice. Ethical Engineering is Multifaceted, Even in One Industry Guided by phenomenography, we identified six different ways to experience ethics in engineering practice, even in one industry. This finding is consistent with a multifaceted understanding of engineering ethics. For example, the varied aspects of the categories include a range of technical, professional, and interpersonal skills, which are common in scholarly discussions of engineering ethics (e.g., micro-ethics and macro-ethics, Herkert, 2005 ). The recent extensive revision to the code of ethics for the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES, 2021 ) is an encouraging alignment with an expanded understanding of ethical engineering as multifaceted. This professional society for many engineers in the health products industry now has a code that reflects a wider range of practical aspects than the original code of 2004. Further revisions of the code could consider alignment with the six categories of way of experiencing ethics as identified in this study. Other aspects of this multifaceted understanding of ethics, such as the emphasis on stewarding organizational culture of Category F, are not as present in the literature about ethics in health products industry, despite being recognized in engineering ethics literature more generally, where the importance of culture, including disciplinary culture (Martin et al., 2021 ) and organizational culture (Davis, 2006 ; Lynch & Kline, 2017 ), are stressed. While the importance of culture is also discussed in literature of other professional ethics fields, such as business ethics (e.g., Stead et al., 1990 ; Treviño & Nelson, 2021 , pp. 116–162), understanding ethical engineering as stewarding of an ethical organizational culture is rarely addressed in strategies of engineering ethics education (Hess & Fore, 2018 ) or training (Shaw & Whitney, 2016 ; Sawad & Andrews, 2022 ). We suggest that sharing these study findings with engineering students as well as industry engineers could expand their awareness and understanding of the variety of ways engineers actually experience ethics in industry practice. For example, when we have presented these findings in our engineering ethics courses, we emphasized the situational and contextual aspects of ethics in various engineering roles and systems, including the prominent role of stewarding organizational culture and the understanding that individuals shape culture. Similarly, ethics instructors could use the outcome space (Fig. 2 ) to explain variations in ethical practice and to encourage students or engineers to consider how each category might be suited to a specific context in industrial practice (Trevelyan, 2019 ; Smith et al., 2021 ) and how they might act ethically in the most appropriate way. Ethics instructors also might consider how to create opportunities that encourage learners to experience ethics in engineering in more varied ways. Often, ethics education is focused only on codes or regulatory guidelines (Adams et al., 2001 ; Hess et al., 2023a ). Experiential approaches such as case-studies or role-play can engage learners with more ambiguity and consideration around important ethical tradeoffs. We appeal to educators and trainers to discontinue the search for a single best approach to engaging ethics learning and development. In turn, we invite incorporating multiple approaches to give learners greater opportunity to engage with the broader range and variability of ethics considerations. One approach would be to include learning activities that engage directly with the experiences of a range of working engineers (Trevelyan, 2019 ; Smith et al., 2021 ). Engineering instructors could have students examine various situations where the different ways of experiencing ethics arise. For example, if an instructor wants students to understand the importance of Stewarding Culture (Category F), which included engineers in leadership roles, they could prompt students to examine the social and institutional contexts (Davis, 2006 ; Morrison, 2020 ) of their extra-curricular leadership experiences. Emphasizing variation in understanding ethical engineering also could involve revising classroom problems to be sufficiently complex or ill-structured (Davis, 2006 ) similar to real-world industry challenges and then encouraging students to make decisions in collaboration with other perspectives including non-engineers (Hoffmann & Borenstein, 2014 ; Smith et al., 2021 ). Ethical Engineering is Situated and Contextual in All Aspects of Engineering Practice In this study, we found engineers’ understanding of their roles and responsibilities within their specific, situated understanding of the system informed their ways of experiencing ethical engineering practice in every category. The understanding that ethical engineering practice is situated and contextual is evidenced from the dimensions of variation identified in the relationships among the categories of description as presented in the outcome space. Phenomenographic analysis of the data in the transcripts revealed the relationships that underlie these dimensions of variation. This finding echoes the conclusions of studies in business ethics (Rees et al., 2022 ), where scholars have argued for decades that understanding and managing ethical behavior in organizations is a pervasive contextual and situational issue (Stead et al., 1990 ). Ethics scholars long have recognized that employees’ decisions “to act ethically or unethically are influenced by a myriad of individual and situational factors” (Stead et al., 1990 . p. 234). Extending this line of thinking to our study’s context, situational factors that influenced how engineers experienced ethical engineering practice included their role or responsibility as defined by their organization, explicit values or company norms that defined ethical behaviors in various contexts, as well as the observed behaviors of various levels of leadership. The literature on engineering ethics often appeals to norms of technical and professional practice, e.g., codes of ethics. Categories B, C, and D each captured aspects of an appeal to technical and professional competence. Tensions may arise when these engineering norms conflict with competing norms, including norms of their team (Zhu et al., 2014 ) or their company (Mueller, 2022 ). In Category D, engineers struggled to reconcile internal moral values with external norms - both company and industry. Moral psychologists have suggested that internalized social norms are predictors of ethical behavior (O’Fallon & Butterfield, 2012 ; Antes et al., 2007 ). Norms function both on the individual, internalized level and on the external, community/societal levels and thus can lead a “double life” (Kelly & Morar, 2020 , p. 87) of influencing behaviors. In more comprehensive categories (E and F), engineers were engaging with norms of business practice, regulatory oversight, medical practice, and others beyond the norms of engineering alone. Future research on ethical engineering in industry should consider how norms of individuals and collectives (organizations, industries, and societies) interact to influence an engineer’s way of experiencing engineering practice (Zacharias et al., 2025 ). While we found that engineers experienced ethics in many distinct contexts and roles in their industry practice, it was notable that during the interviews, nearly all participants emphasized that there were no aspects of their engineering practice that did not involve ethics. When asked specifically which aspect of their practice did not involve ethics, nearly every participant stated that there were no such aspects. For this reason, ethics instructors should emphasize the pervasiveness of ethical issues in all aspects of engineering practice, to dispel the belief that ethics arises only in unusual circumstances. We encourage all those who teach in engineering programs to continuously emphasize the relevance and importance of ethical practice to every context, role, and responsibility of engineers and all aspects of an industry ecosystem. Thus, instructors need to seek to embed ethics across their engineering curricula (Davis, 2006 ), not just in one ethics course or only in engineering design projects. As the findings of this study suggested that engineers’ experiences with ethical engineering practice reflect their roles and responsibilities within their organization, ethics training for engineers should be aligned and might need to shift depending on the target learner population. Ethics instructors or trainers might consider targeting specific ethics skills needed based on the findings from this study or from their own evaluations of the ethics challenges and expected responses for each population. As engineers change roles throughout their career, targeting additional ethics training and development around critical points of career development or role change would be highly beneficial. For example, entry level, new to role, or individuals in more pragmatic type positions could benefit from ethics training that addresses concerns in Categories A and B. Engineers in roles with greater ambiguity or more interactions with data and people may desire developmental opportunities for navigating a greater awareness of complexity or perspective variation as identified by those who had experiences associated with Categories C and D. And to promote the formation of more ethical engineering leaders, aspects of Category F could become a guide for training. Also, instructors who design professional development workshops for engineering practitioners to satisfy continuing education requirements for the renewal of their professional licenses should consider including different ethics competencies from the range identified with this study. Limitations and Future Work While the results of this study provide a more comprehensive understanding of the varied ways to experience ethical engineering practice in the health products industry and we designed the study with a quality framework for achieving the best data possible, we have identified three limitations which require future investigation as well as opportunities for these findings to further inform engineering ethics education. First, phenomenography provides descriptive findings rather than normative results. The findings reflect what were the experiences of ethical engineering rather than what ethical engineering ought to be . So while this study did aim to explore how engineers experience ethics in practice and we invite educators to consider how they can better prepare the workforce to engage with these ways of experiencing, we do not claim this to be prescriptive for how ethics should be viewed or carried out in the health products industry. And while we claim that this study adds significant insight into a comprehensive picture for how engineering ethics may be experienced in practice, we do not presume that it captures the complete picture. As stated, phenomenography focuses on the ways in which people experience a phenomenon. This study contributes to a greater understanding of engineering ethics in the health products industry but falls short of providing a complete framework of all aspects of engineering ethics practice. Additional studies using both qualitative and quantitative methods need to be conducted to further understand the thoughts, feelings, perspectives, behaviors, and norms associated with each domain of ethical engineering practice. Future research should also seek to triangulate these findings with other normative and developmental ethical frameworks (e.g., Perry, 1998 ). Second, the study parameters influenced study findings. The findings represent variations in 43 engineers’ ways of experiencing a phenomenon (ethical engineering practice) in a context (health products industry) and timeframe (data collected in 2018). Exploring other industrial contexts (e.g., automotive, aviation, construction, communication electronics) might lead to distinct findings: for example, some engineers explained that they had previous experiences in other industries that differed from their experiences in the health products industry. Moreover, three prominent elements of engineering ethics education literature: whistle-blowing, codes of ethics, and sustainability did not explicitly appear in these interviews, further suggesting that ethical engineering can have distinctive elements arise in different industries. Even though we had a large sample size for a phenomenographic study and believe we reached appropriate saturation of variation of experiences, we want to acknowledge that participants self-selected the experiences that they discussed and thus we may still not have captured all aspects of experience (e.g., limitations due to participant recall, willingness to share specific experiences or aspects thereof, non-disclosure agreements). For example, one thing we noted is that participants described few decisively negative ethical engineering experiences. This stands out even though we emphasized that there were no expected, correct, or desired responses to the interview question. We acknowledge that participants might have avoided mentioning more extreme unethical encounters especially if they were reluctant to share their part in it. Thus, we suggest future research might consider examining different industry contexts with other methodological approaches and ethical frameworks to determine if these findings and interpretations are generalizable or can be further expanded. Thirdly, while the finding of increasing comprehensiveness in the structural relationships of the six categories was presumed by the research methodology, we encourage readers to resist inferring that a more comprehensive category is necessarily more desirable. The findings also revealed that differing engineering contexts require differing ethical behaviors. This is reflected in Åkerlind ( 2024 ), “From a phenomenographic perspective, less sophisticated conceptions are regarded not so much as wrong, but as incomplete or limited, lacking awareness of key aspects of the phenomenon that are discerned in more complex conceptions. On this basis, conceptual development is seen as requiring the expansion of individuals’ awareness to include aspects of the phenomenon that they did not previously discern.” (p. 10). Thus, we encourage educators and trainers to include instruction around all perspectives or at least to prioritize relevance to industry contexts. Future research may investigate how and why people may shift between ways of experiencing engineering ethics and how appropriate different ways of experiencing, or features thereof, may be in different engineering situations and contexts. To that end, additional analysis of data from this study identified critical incidents that influenced individuals’ ways of experiencing ethical engineering practice (Hess et al., 2023a ) Further research could then identify how critical incidences link with categorical ways of experiencing ethics and what methods of education and training might best support an engineer’s development towards greater expansion of ethical awareness. In addition to inspiring future research directions, there are several opportunities for future practice developing tools or strategies to support ethics education. As an initial example, the categories of description could be used to develop learner personas. Personas are lifelike representations of users that help designers understand user goals and experiences and keep users in mind through the design process (Cooper, 1999 ; Nielsen, 2013 ; Pruitt & Adlin, 2010 ). They have been utilized in engineering education settings to support curricular reform (Ozkan et al., 2019 ) and help instructors empathize with their learners (Fila et al., 2022 ). Huynh and colleagues ( 2021 ) demonstrated a process of developing learner personas through phenomenography, which could be applied to the current study. Complementarily, personas based on the categories of description herein could represent learning targets or representations of engineers upon which educators and students could reflect. Second, the experiences reported herein and further represented in interview could be used to develop new engineering ethics cases. Such cases could complement larger-scale disaster cases by representing everyday ethical engineering practice (Lloyd & Busby, 2003 ). Finally, as a practice already initiated, we have begun exploring how critical incidents representing changes in way of experiencing might be translated into pedagogical strategies (Hess et al., 2023a ). Conclusion We investigated the ethics experiences of engineers in the health products industry. We defined six categories of description that capture distinct ways of experiencing ethical engineering practice. The categories vary along two dimensions: Understanding the System and Understanding Role and Responsibility. These dimensions of variation indicate that engineering ethics should be understood and taught as situated and important to every aspect and context of engineering practice. Similar studies in other industries would expand this understanding of engineering ethics in practice and, in turn, enhance alignment of ethics training with professional practice. Finally, engineering instructors could use these findings to identify curricular goals and to design strategies to better prepare engineering students and industry engineers for handling ethical challenges in professional practice. Appendix – Interview Protocol (NOTE: will be stored online in a data repository) Section  1. Background Questions Thank you for completing the survey prior to this study. I see from your responses that you have degrees in [specify degree]. Could you talk a little about that? How did you decide to pursue those degree(s)? I see that you that you are working in [specify field], and that you have worked in that field for [specify number of years]. How did you decide to work in that field? What is your role in your most recent position? How long have you worked in this role? Why did you pursue that position or role? Could you specify the company you currently work for? What other internships / c o-op / work experiences have you had? What are your plans in the next five years of your career? Why does that option interest you? Section  2. Describing Experiences Can you describe an experience you have had with ethics in engineering? What was your role in the situation? Who else was involved in this situation? What were their roles? How did you approach the situation? Please walk me through the experience. Why did you take that approach? What led you to do things in that way? -OR- How did you decide to do these things? What feelings did you experience during this situation? -OR- How did you feel during this situation? How does that connect to ethics in engineering? (How is this an example of ethics in engineering?) How did the situation end? Were there any repercussions or long-term implications of the situation? If so, what were they? NOTE: Heuristics to stop probing: Participant begins to repeat detail with no new information. Participant struggles to answer requests for further elaboration. Instinct tells you relatively full meaning has been conveyed. About an hour has elapsed (need to move to conceptual/summative questions). Could you recap the elements of the experience relevant to ethics in engineering? -OR- Why did you choose this experience to discuss? What did that experience mean for you in terms of how you view ethics in engineering? Did this situation change the way that you think about ethical situations in general, ethics at work, or ethics in engineering in specific? Did you feel prepared for this situation? If so, what helped prepare you for the situation? Was there anything particularly easy or hard for you in this situation? Were there any things that you wanted to know or wish that you had experienced to help you prepare for this situation? Note: Heuristics to gather more nuance (consider these throughout). Why do you say that? Would you explain what you mean by _____? Could you tell me more about ____? Earlier you said ____. How does that connect? How does that connect to ethics in engineering? What did that mean to you? How did you feel when? What was going through your mind when? How did you feel about ____? Other Experiences If yes, probe with questions above. Can you describe another experience you have had that involved ethics in engineering? How do you think this is different from the experience we talked about earlier? Non-ethical experiences: Can you describe an experience you had, within engineering practice, that did not involve ethics? How do you think this differed from your experiences of ethics in engineering? [If participant cannot think of one]: Why do you think that is? Explore connections, contrasts, whys, etc. Section  3. Conceptual Understanding Based on what we have discussed, what would you say ethical engineering practice is? [NOTE: Does that match with how they talked about their experiences?] When you think about being ethical at work, what does that mean to you? When you think about doing ethical engineering, what does that mean? What ethical considerations are important to think about when practicing engineering? What factors influence an engineer’s approach to ethics in engineering practice? What aspects of the work environment influence an engineer’s approach to ethics in engineering practice? What aspects of society influence an engineer’s approach to ethics in engineering practice? How have your views of ethics in engineering changed over time? What experiences do you believe contributed the most to your understanding of ethics in engineering? Please describe any experiences you had outside of work that influenced your way of thinking about ethics in engineering? Section  4. Summative Questions Reflecting on your experiences, is there anything you would do differently related to ethical issues you have encountered in your engineering work? Are there other things? [NOTE: Step through each thing or experience] What other practices or norms would you like to see changed in your workplace related to ethical engineering practice? Is there anything else that you want to add about your experiences of ethics in engineering? Is there anything we didn’t ask about? Follow up with any aspects that they did not talk about earlier. Why did you choose to participate in this study? How accurately and thoroughly do you think you communicated your experiences and perspectives? What could have changed that? What are your questions for me? Would you like to choose a pseudonym for us to use during analysis and in any publications? Thank you for your time!!! Acknowledgements This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1737303. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation. Author Contribution All authors contributed to the study conception, design, qualitative materials preparation, data collection, and analysis. The first draft of the manuscript was written jointly by Nicholas Fila and Carla Zoltowski and they share joint first authorship. All authors edited and commented on previous versions of the manuscript and read and approved the final manuscript. 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