2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Undergraduate student mental health has declined in recent years, with national data showing significant increases in anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. Although existing studies have found that undergraduate engineering students report similar rates of mental health distress as their peers in other majors, distressed engineering students exhibit lower rates of mental health help-seeking. Previous qualitative research has discovered cultures of stress and shame in engineering programs that harm students’ mental health and normalize mental health issues. To improve help-seeking intervention design, it is critical to identify response trends that indicate the presence of groups of students that share similar help-seeking beliefs within the surveyed population . To address these concerns, we used a self-report survey instrument guided by the Integrated Behavioral Model (IBM) to survey 452 first-year engineering students at a large, predominantly White, public university about their mental health help-seeking beliefs and intention . This quantitative study sought to identify subgroups of first-year engineering students who shared similar mental health help-seeking beliefs and how these beliefs relate to their intention to seek help for their mental health.
Latent class analysis (LCA) was used to categorize students into meaningfully distinct classes based on their responses to five measures: attitude, injunctive perceived norms, descriptive perceived norms, and personal agency (split into control and confidence). Using a three-class model, students appeared to be split into low-intention, mid-intention, and high-intention subgroups. However, when a four-class model was applied, we identified a class of students that was masked when grouping students based on the three-class model. The four-class model identified two subgroups with low help-seeking intention. While both groups reported low attitudes and perceived norms, one of these subgroups, on average, reported low perceived control and confidence, while the other reported high perceived control and confidence. This suggests that a portion of surveyed first-year engineering students believe they would be able to seek help if they wanted to, but they likely would not want to seek professional treatment, even when faced with a serious mental health concern. These findings illustrate the importance of person-centered analysis methods to identify response trends, allowing for the identification of differing mental health belief classes in first year engineering students. These classes can be used to develop mental health interventions that are tailored to the specific needs of engineering students.