Interview Protocol
This interview protocol emerged from our study funded by the PIT-UN ("Public Interest Technology University Network") Challenge Grant. For this study, the NEP team interviewed Computer Science and Engineering students. The protocol covers the following themes: 1) students' understanding of ethics education at their institutions; 2) how they understand what ethics is; 3) career aspirations; 4) the relationship between ethics and their future career; and 5) institutional messaging around ethics. The protocol is useful for understanding students' perceptions of ethics and ethics education across institutional contexts, and it is designed to elicit rich participant responses.
The two key strengths of the protocol are its comprehensiveness and flexibility: while the protocol covers a comprehensive range of relevant topics, it also allows for flexible customizing. If, for instance, researchers outside of the NEP wish to utilize this protocol but are not interested in understanding students’ perceptions of institutional messaging around ethics, they can remove the related section altogether to cater the protocol to suit their research needs.
In our study, the interviews covered the following major topics introduced in the protocol:
- students’ understanding of ethics education at their institutions;
- their definition of ethics;
- career aspirations;
- the relationship between ethics and career;
- institutional messaging around ethics;
and lasted approximately for an hour each. After transcribing each interview, we then developed a codebook to facilitate the interview coding process. Notably, the protocol allows students’ spontaneous remarks about what they learned or gained from their ethics instructions and helps researchers ascertain patterns in student responses that may not emerge in surveys with predetermined items to select.