2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Creation of an intervention-focused mental health help-seeking beliefs instrument for engineering students

Presented at ERM Technical Session: Student Mental Health & Wellbeing I

This is a Full Paper reporting on Empirical Research. Engineering students are less likely to seek professional treatment for their mental health than students in other majors. Without professional intervention, mental health problems can worsen over time. As such, it is necessary for engineering students to get help when they need it. One way to improve their professional help-seeking behavior is to identify beliefs held by engineering students that influence their decisions to seek mental health treatment. This is beneficial, as we can then work to change those beliefs (or the problematic conditions, such as lack of adequate on-campus mental health support, that result in those beliefs) to promote seeking help among engineering students. To this end, this study uses a self-report survey instrument, the Undergraduate Engineering Mental Health Help Seeking Instrument (UE-MH-HSI), which was previously developed for this purpose based on the Integrated Behavioral Model (IBM).
The UE-MH-HSI was originally developed based on data from engineering students at a Primarily White Institution. To ensure that the instrument was inclusive of help-seeking beliefs of students at other institutions, focus groups were conducted with students at two other institutions to identify and incorporate beliefs not represented in the original version. In September 2023, data was collected from engineering students at three institutions using the expanded version of the instrument. These institutions included a large public university with a predominantly White population (n = 582), a large public Hispanic-serving institution (n = 274), and a public Historically Black University (n = 77). While the expanded instrument is comprehensive and more generalizable to a diverse engineering student population, the instrument contains a considerable number of items, making it time consuming to administer. Therefore, this paper will highlight efforts to reduce the length of the instrument to improve the feasibility of its administration, resulting in an “intervention-focused” version of the UE-MH-HSI. This version of the instrument is designed to identify practical mental health intervention targets, as well as measure the impact of interventions on student help seeking beliefs. To do this, bivariate correlations among items were examined to identify significant overlap, in both the overall population and within key demographic subgroups (e.g., women, Black, Asian, Latinx, first generation, etc.). Items with considerable statistical overlap, within both the overall sample and across subgroups, were removed from the instrument. Further, belief items were evaluated to assess the viability of university stakeholders (e.g., administrators, faculty, staff) implementing interventions that might realistically result in a change to that belief. Overall, the instrument was reduced from 104 items to 69 items, resulting in a more feasible survey administration time of 15-20 minutes. Finally, this refined version of the instrument was used to identify beliefs that were strongly correlated with help-seeking intention. These beliefs include: the efficacy of treatment, knowledge about and access to resources, and their perceptions of the beliefs and behaviors of engineering faculty and other engineering students. These findings will inform the development of targeted interventions to improve professional mental health treatment use among undergraduate engineering students.

Authors

Matthew Whitwer http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1746-8307 University of Kentucky [biography]

Matthew Whitwer is a fourth year PhD student in the department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Kentucky. He completed his bachelor's degree in chemical engineering at West Virginia University in 2020.
Dr. Sarah A Wilson University of Kentucky [biography]

Sarah Wilson is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering at the University of Kentucky. She completed her bachelor's degree at Rowan University in New Jersey before attending graduate school for her PhD at the University of Massachusetts.
Dr. Joseph H Hammer University of Kentucky [biography]

Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology
Dr. Jerrod A Henderson http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-0501-5805 University of Houston - William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering [biography]

Dr. Jerrod A. Henderson (“Dr. J”) is an Assistant Professor in the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering in the Cullen College of Engineering at the University of Houston (UH).
He began his higher education pursuits at Morehouse College and North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, where he earned degrees in Chemistry and Chemical Engineering as a part of the Atlanta University Center’s Dual Degree in Engineering Program. While in college, he was a Ronald E. McNair Scholar, which afforded him the opportunity to intern at NASA Langley. He also earned distinction as a Phi Beta Kappa member and an American Chemical Society Scholar. Dr. Henderson completed his Ph.D. in Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a graduate student, he was a NASA Harriet G. Jenkins Graduate Fellow and mentor for the Summer Research Opportunities Program.
Dr. Henderson has dedicated his career to increasing the number of students who are in pathways to pursue STEM careers. He believes that exposing students to STEM early will have a lasting impact on their lives and academic pursuits. He co-founded the St. Elmo Brady STEM Academy (SEBA). SEBA is an educational intervention that introduces underrepresented and underserved fourth and fifth-grade students and their families to hands-on STEM experiences.
Dr. Henderson is the immediate past Director of the Program for Mastery in Engineering Studies (PROMES, pronounced “promise”), a program aimed at increasing engineering student achievement, engagement, and graduation rates. His research group seeks to understand engineering identity trajectories and success mechanisms throughout lifespans using action-based participatory research and novel methodologies such as photovoice, IPA, and draw-an-engineer and the development of research-informed interventions to improve student success.
He was most recently recognized by INSIGHT Into Diversity Magazine as an Inspiring STEM Leader, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences (LAS) Outstanding Young Alumni Award, Career Communications Group with a Black Engineer of the Year Award for college-level promotion of engineering education and a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2023 to advance his work that centers engineering identities of Black men in engineering.
Dr. Sherri S Frizell Prairie View A&M University [biography]

Sherri S. Frizell is a Professor in the Computer Science Department at Prairie View A&M University. She has a B.S. in Computer Science from Jackson State University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science and Software Engineering from Auburn University. Her research interests include responsible computing, human-centered computing, STEM education, and the persistence of minorities and women in engineering.

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 22, 2025, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 25, 2025

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