While several studies have advanced the engineering education community's understanding of the experiences of students from underrepresented groups, less work has focused on unpacking the beliefs of engineering students more broadly as it relates to diversity and inclusion. Because generating such information is a challenging task, the purpose of this paper is to discuss the methodological lessons learned in our attempt to advance understanding of the values and beliefs students' hold about these topics. In this paper, we discuss in detail the development of instrument items, subsequent data analysis, and lessons learned in the process. Overall, our analysis suggests that our instrument failed to define task values at a level specific enough for students to discriminate one task from another. Ultimately, we concluded that instrument items were highly correlated, thus not suitable for confirmatory factor analysis. Based on these insights, we offer pragmatic suggestions for refinement of the instrument. In these suggestions, we aim to enlighten future efforts to engage students in the diversification and inclusivity of the engineering field, and prevent future researchers from making similar methodological mistakes.
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