2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This is a WIP Methods/Theory paper aimed at developing an interview protocol that will be used to better understand anxiety as it is experienced by working engineering students. The protocol being developed in this paper represents the first phase of a longer project investigating the sources and dynamics of anxiety among this population

In 2020, 70% of part-time students and 40% of full-time students were employed while enrolled in college [1]. Many of these students worked over 20 hours a week. Given that a substantial proportion of college students work, it is important to examine their experiences, with particular attention to their mental health. Research indicates that working students experience significant mental health challenges associated with anxiety despite performing similarly to non-working students in their coursework academically [2]. These findings imply that working students may experience anxiety differently than their non-working peers, enabling them to perform similarly in coursework despite higher stress levels. Additionally, engineering students in particular have sources of stress and anxiety that are unique to the culture of engineering [3]. Therefore, it is crucial to understand how working engineering students conceptualize and experience anxiety. For this project, we propose the development of a three-interview sequence protocol [4], supplemented with participant-generated artifacts, to gain insight into how working engineering students experience and conceptualize anxiety. To guide the design of this protocol, we will integrateTinto’s Student Integration Theory (SIT), the Expectancy-Value Theory of Anxiety (EVTA), and Bourdieu’s Social Reproduction Theory (SRT). EVTA will provide a lens for understanding how students value different experiences and how that affects their anxiety levels. SRT will situate the students’ anxiety experiences in the greater context of the institution and help us see how academic structures - such as policies, workloads, and support systems - may inadvertently reproduce inequalities that can exacerbate these students’ experiences. SIT will serve as a bridge between EVTA and SRT, allowing us to examine how both the individual experiences and the institutional structures affect students’ integration into college and their subsequent academic decisions. The interview protocol being developed in this study is aimed at understanding how working engineering students conceptualize and experience anxiety cognitively, physically, and emotionally. This work contributes to educational research methods by illustrating how multiple theoretical frameworks can be integrated to guide the development of interview protocols that capture complex student experiences.

References
[1] National Center for Education Statistics, “College Student Employment,” Condition of Education, 2022. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/ssa (accessed Oct. 13, 2025).
[2] Mounsey, R., Vandehey, M., & Diekhoff, G. (2013). Working and Non-Working University Students: Anxiety, Depression, and Grade Point Average. College Student Journal, 47(2), 379–389
[3] Jensen, K. J., Mirabelli, J. F., Kunze, A. J., Romanchek, T. E., & Cross, K. J. (2023). Undergraduate student perceptions of stress and mental health in engineering culture. International journal of STEM education, 10(1), 30. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-023-00419-6
[4] Seidman, I. (2019). Interviewing as qualitative research a guide for researchers in education and the social sciences (Fifth edition.). Teachers College Press.

Keywords: interviews, nontraditional students, phenomenography, mental health