Faculty and student attitudes toward community service: A comparative analysis

The Humanitarian Engineering initiative, sponsored by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, at the Colorado School of Mines, is creating a program that will support engineering students in understanding their responsibility for solving community development problems that exist throughout the world. As part of this effort, data has been collected on faculty and student attitudes using the "Community Service Attitudes Scale," developed and validated by Shiarella, McCarthy, and Tucker. During the fall 2004, 78 students and 34 faculty members responded to this instrument. Statistically significant differences were found between the attitudes of students and faculty, males and females, and among different age groupings with respect to service activities. A general finding was that faculty displayed better attitudes toward community service than the students.