2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

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.