Designing a Survey Instrument for a National Study of Direct-pathway and Returning Engineering Graduate Students

Though a majority of engineering PhD students begin their doctoral career shortly after completing an undergraduate degree, what we call direct-pathway students, a significant minority of students are “returners,” students who pursue a PhD after working outside of academia for five or more years. In the first phase of a three year NSF-funded study to characterize the population of returning engineering PhD students, we developed a nationallydistributed survey to compare experiences and perspectives of returners and direct-pathway students. The survey development was grounded in Eccles’ Expectancy Value Theory (EVT), as well as literature on returning students and a pilot study. The survey included questions about students’ motivation for returning, their previous work and school experience, their future career plans, the challenges of graduate school, and their strategies for adapting to these challenges. This paper presents the development of the survey, in which we highlight best practices from the literature that informed the development and refinement process. We show iterations of the survey and data from the advisory board and our cognitive interviews that informed the final version of the instrument.