2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Graduate education faces serious issues of high attrition rates and prevalent mental health distress rates. Prior research has linked both attrition and mental health distress to the effects of high stress environments in graduate student workplaces (e.g., Stubb et al., 2014, Bekkouche et al., 2022). Research on doctoral student stress often focuses on single stressors, where generally only one source of stress is the focus of a study. While deep explorations of stressors are important, little work has been done to observe and compare stressors across the broad range of sources experienced by doctoral students and none of that work has looked at changes in stress over time. Thus, we interviewed 55 doctoral engineering students four times each about their experiences with stress during the 2021-2022 academic year. We conducted a thematic analysis of interviews grounded in the job-control-hindrance support model (Karasek, 1979; Dawson et al., 2015) and using qualitative codes emerging from the data. Coding for the broad landscape of stressors resulted in identifying major themes consistent with prior literature (e.g., advisor-related, coursework-related stressors) and sub-stressors within those themes (e.g., writing feedback from advisors, balancing coursework with other expectations). Sub-stressors within themes were largely consistent with the literature with some novel sub-stressors or stressors which were differently prevalent compared with reports from prior literature. Particularly salient within our data are advisor interactions and expectations, research direction and workload, and issues related to work-life balance. We report the top ten sub-stressors that are present in our data corpus based on frequency of coded responses. We also report on trends in students’ coping strategies and situate these within prior literature on coping landscapes (e.g., Sallai et al., 2022). Finally, we suggest implications for further research and implications for doctoral advisors and students.

References

Bekkouche, N. S., Schmid, R. F. & Carliner, S. (2022). “Simmering Pressure”: How systemic stress impacts graduate student mental health. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 34, 547-572.
Dawson, K. M., O'Brien, K. E., & Beehr, T. A. (2016). The role of hindrance stressors in the job demand–control–support model of occupational stress: A proposed theory revision. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 37, 397– 415.
Karasek, R. A. (1979). Job demands, job decision latitude, and mental strain: Implications for job redesign, Administrative Science Quarterly, 24(2), 285-308.
Sallai, G. Vicente, J., Shanachilubwa, K., Berdanier, C. (2022, August). Coping landscapes: How graduate engineering students’ coping mechanisms correspond with dominant stressors in graduate school, Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN.
Stubb, J., Pyhältö, K., & Lonka, K. (2014). Conceptions of research: The doctoral student experience in three domains, Studies in Higher Education, 39(2), 251-264.