WIP: Developing Rasch/Guttman Scenario Scales towards an Empathy in Design Instrument

This work-in-progress (WIP) paper presents initial work to develop a progressive scenario-based instrument to measure empathy in an engineering design context. This work leverages the Rasch/Guttman Scenario (RGS) Scale Methodology as an approach to develop scenario items to understand hierarchically progressive constructs. While traditional Likert-type scales are useful for understanding the intensity of constructs, they are not ideal for investigating progressive or hierarchical phenomena and often use short and narrowly focused items to create multi-item scales and reduce measurement error. Scenario scales use richer hypothetical situations to assess respondents’ attitudes and behaviors, including those that embed progress and hierarchy relationships too complex for Likert-type scales. Empathy is increasingly recognized as an important part of engineering education, particularly in design, as it can enable one to effectively meet user needs and can provide the “spark of human concern” for users. Previous work developed a Likert-type instrument to explore empathy in design but found that while the items could measure empathy type in a design context, they lacked reliability in assessing empathy in different design phases. To better capture how empathy manifests across progressive engineering design phases, the RGS methodology provides a way to capture hierarchical levels of empathy that span dimensions of motivation, orientation, and intensity. RGS combines Facet Theory, which is a systematic approach to map and integrate theory and research design decisions to create scenarios that engage a range of possible facets (i.e., empathy type and design phase) and intensities. These scenarios can be tested with Rasch measurement modeling to understand how the intended measures capture the hierarchical nature of the phenomenon. This paper presents the completion of the first three steps of a seven-step scenario development process which include: 1) defining the constructs, 2) determining facets and generating descriptions, and 3) determining facet levels and generating descriptions. This work emphasizes the crafting of facet-level descriptions that prepare the team for future steps in creating sets of five to seven scenarios for each of four constructs reflecting empathy in a step of the design process.