2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

A psychologically safe environment is characterized by people who feel safe to voice ideas and concerns, willingly seek feedback, have positive intentions to one another, engage in constructive confrontation, and feel safe to take risks and experiment. Outside of academia, psychological safety has been shown to impact creativity, work performance, and work engagement. In academic research environments, faculty have a major leadership role in cultivating a psychologically safe environment amongst their academic research teams. Effective graduate student mentoring, which includes both career and psychosocial support, is critical to the development and retention of talented engineers in the US workforce. There is a need to better understand how engineering departments can cultivate more inclusive, psychologically safe environments in which graduate students feel safe to engage in interpersonal risk-taking, especially in research settings.

Guided by the Conservation of Resources theory, this project aims to address the following research question: What are the relationships between faculty advisor mentoring, doctoral student psychological safety, and the subsequent positive and negative outcomes for doctoral students? This work in progress paper presents the first quantitative phase of an explanatory mixed methods research design within the overarching project. The quantitative phase will address the following research aims: 1) Identify relationships between mentorship, psychological safety, and engineering doctoral student mental health, 2) Identify mentoring competencies that are predictive of research group psychological safety, and 3) Identify how different demographics experience mentoring and psychological safety in their research groups.

Researchers developed a survey consisting of five pre-existing scales, four open-ended questions, and demographics questions. The scales include dyadic and team psychological safety, mentoring competency, mental health and well-being, and job stress. The survey was reviewed by graduate students outside of the participant pool at multiple institutions as well as an external advisory board panel and revised to improve clarity and ensure the selection of appropriate subscales.

The survey will be administered via Qualtrics. Graduate students who have been enrolled in their doctoral program for at least one year and currently have a doctoral research advisor will be recruited to participate in the survey at four public, research-intensive institutions. The planned target sample size is 200-300 graduate students.

This paper will present the design of the survey and preliminary survey results. As the first part of a larger mixed-methods study, the survey responses provide insight into graduate level engineering education and how doctoral students can be better supported.