The Journal of College & University Student Housing Vol. 47 No. 1 - 70

Samuel Wonson * Lori L. Moore * Pauline Wade * Dustin K. Grabsch *  Kasey Martinez * Andrea M. Ogilvie

are professionals in the area that I would like to
enter. " Seven items made up professional selfefficacy, such as " I have no doubt that I will
master all the skills necessary to succeed in my
future work. " Preference for a particular profession, the fifth and final factor, consisted of
items like " Do you already know what kind of
work or profession you prefer? " All the items
except one were placed on a 5-point Likert scale
of 1 (never true), 2 (not really true), 3 (neutral), 4
(somewhat true), and 5 (definitely true). The exception was " Do you already know what kind
of work or profession you prefer? " which required a response of yes or no. Construct reliability was achieved using the coefficient H
test (Hancock & Mueller, 2001), with results
greater than 0.7 for each factor, which indicated good reliability (Tan et al., 2016).
PIFFS was chosen for this study because
of its intended use as a means " to analyze
the professional development of students in
the course of their education " and to measure
" the success of curriculum in bringing about
these changes, and in determining the stages
of the curriculum at which significant changes
occur " (Tan, 2014, p. 58). Because LLCs are
considered pedagogical and/or curricular approaches (Kingston et al., 2014; Zeller, 2008),
they may provide a meaningful avenue for
comparing professional identity development
in LLC participants to that of non-LLC participants. Thus, the scale was appropriate to use
for this population and for the overall purpose
of the study. Additionally, in the original study,
the sample was divided into two subgroups:
the high professional identity group, with
scores from 3.27 to 4.53 (n = 625), and the low
professional identity group, with scores from
1.67 to 3.23 (n = 670). The average of the scores

70

was 3.23, SD = 0.44 (Tan et al., 2016). The two
groups (high and low professional identities)
were compared using the independent sample
t-test if there were indeed expected and distinct
differences across all five factors that were important in contributing to professional identity
development (Tan et al., 2016).

Engineering identity. Godwin (2016) developed an 11-item measure of the engineering
identity of postsecondary students with three
constructs: " students' feeling of recognition
by others; students' interest in the subject;
and students' beliefs about their performance/
competence in the subject area " (p. 5). These
self-reported items were measured by asking
students to what extent they agreed or disagreed with particular statements about their
professional identity on an anchored scale
with ratings of 0 (strongly disagree), 1 (disagree), 2 (somewhat disagree), 3 (neither disagree
nor agree), 4 (somewhat agree), 5 (agree), and
6 (strongly agree). Additionally, using Godwin's anchored scale rather than a Likert scale
allowed for " a more interpretable distance
between each numeric response and made the
assumption of continuous scales associated
with maximum likelihood factor analysis more
valid " (p. 5).

. . . identity is dynamic, so
quantitative research might flatten
the data by preventing students from
explaining the rich context of their
identity formation as an engineer.

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Journal of College & University Student Housing Vol. 47 No. 1

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