2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Topic/Background: With mental health concerns on the rise, there is a need to develop tools and interventions to support students’ wellbeing. At the same time, survey instruments specific to engineering graduate students’ mental health experiences are limited. Many survey instruments exist for student populations; however, these tend to focus on broader undergraduate experiences, with graduate students being an add-on. This results in a lack of depth and breadth on the experiences specific to graduate school (e.g., research focus, advanced courses, etc.). At the same time, graduate students are not a monolith. Graduate students within engineering programs often have varied experiences that may not translate to graduate students in other disciplines, such as humanities or professional programs (e.g., law programs). Of the surveys that exist, many struggle to capture (1) graduate student specific experiences, (2) discipline-specific experiences, or (3) both. While this may be a result of valid concerns with survey length, respective survey fatigue, or scope in the initial instrument development, the reality is that many of the surveys developed often omit aspects core to engineering graduate students’ mental health experiences.

Purpose: This study seeks to address the call to support the mental health and overall well-being of graduate students by designing and validating a survey instrument to assess mental health experiences of engineering graduate students. Specifically, we seek to answer the question, what factors are needed to assess the range of engineering graduate students’ mental health experiences?

Methods: To answer this question, we developed a survey instrument to assess engineering graduate students’ mental health experiences. Survey instrument development followed a defined model with six iterative stages: (1) item generation and construct development, (2) validity testing, (3) implementation, (4) exploratory factor analysis, (5) confirmatory factor analysis, and (6) instrument modification and replication.

Findings/Conclusions: Findings from this work will focus on the first two stages of instrument design. Specifically, we will detail our approach to item generation and construct development before discussing the two stages of validity testing (cognitive interviews and expert feedback). We then detail the findings from the cognitive interviews before providing a finalized draft version of the survey instrument ready for implementation (or further validation). Implications: The findings from this work will first provide a validated survey instrument that was piloted at an institution as part of the Healthy Minds Network, Healthy Minds Study’s Spring 2025 administration. This instrument will be used to assess engineering graduate students’ mental health experiences, including a list of risk and protective factors core to examining these experiences. Detailing these factors will provide not only direction for future interventions, but a tool to assess the impact of ongoing and future interventions. This can aid to increase the retention of engineering graduate students and their successful degree completion by providing key areas of focus to support positive mental health experiences.