Do Engineers Beget Engineers? Exploring Connections Between the Engineering-related Career Choices of Students and Their Families

There are few studies on how a student's choice of engineering is affected by having an engineer as a family member, yet there are persistent hypotheses about these types of familial influences. Engineering major choice is an important step in the engineering pipeline since paths into engineering are relatively closed after the freshman year. In this work, we explore the influence of familial engineers on students' choice of engineering through a mixed methods approach. The quantitative portion of this study comes from the nationally representative Sustainability and Gender in Engineering (SaGE) survey, completed by 6,772 students enrolled in first-year English courses during Fall 2011. The qualitative data come from seventeen interviews of high school students conducted during in-depth observations at two public U.S. high schools in 2013. A linear regression predicting the likelihood of a an engineering career was constructed with family members' professions and career influence input as predictors, along with controls for students' academic performance, their family's general support for math/science, and their socioeconomic status (SES). From the interview data, students' own narratives about “who has influenced [their] career choice” were coded to triangulate the quantitative data and provide some explanatory power. The results show that siblings or other relatives being an engineer has a stronger positive influence on students' engineering choice than their parents. These results are supported by students' narratives that their “other” family influences are a stronger influence than direct parental influences except for students who reported a strong, positive relationship with a paternal engineering role model. Notably, no gender differences were found in this work.