2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Mental health challenges are a growing concern in engineering education. A culture that promotes wellness in engineering could support both student and faculty psychological health. As part of a larger, ongoing project on the mental health and wellness of undergraduate engineers, our team has investigated how stress and culture interact in engineering education to produce environments that promote hardness over wellness. We posit that faculty and staff are influential stakeholders in defining the culture of academic programs, thus making them important sources of information for understanding the associated core shared beliefs and assumptions. The goal of this paper is to qualitatively analyze what faculty imagine or believe a culture of wellness would look like in engineering. To collect their perceptions of mental health and wellness in engineering culture, our team conducted interviews with faculty and staff informed by the engineering cultural framework proposed by Godfrey and Parker. Participants (N=28) worked primarily with undergraduate students and represented a range of engineering disciplines, from biomedical engineering to engineering physics, as well as a variety of institution types and sizes. Specifically, responses to the question “What do you think a culture of wellness in engineering or your department would or should look like?” were separated from the rest of the data for thematic analysis. We developed a codebook, applied it to the data, and used thematic analysis to identify topics grouped by motif, resulting in three overarching themes representing the data. With a focus on actionable patterns of meaning, the three themes are (1) Building a Supportive Community, (2) Improving Work and Academic Policy, and (3) Supporting Self-Care with Student Wellness Resources. Participants expressed their views on what a culture of wellness might look like and suggested ideas that they believe would be beneficial to implement. These suggestions included aspects of a caring community, mindful policy change, and support for students through wellness resources. Implementing participant suggestions regarding a culture of wellness could lead to changes in the existing culture, which would support engineering student mental health and wellness. To better understand how engineering culture and undergraduate wellness interact, future work will expand interviews to include engineering student views on a culture of wellness. These interviews will be analyzed and synthesized with prior work, which will facilitate the identification of strategies to promote wellness in engineering. Culture is built by the minute actions of all participants, thus identifying individual perceptions of well-being in the engineering community is critical to working towards a culture of wellness that is productive and rewarding for all involved.