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Abstract BackgroundEngineering students encounter high levels of stress, which may negatively impact their mental health. Nevertheless, engineering students who experience mental health distress are less likely than their peers to seek professional help, even when controlling for gender and race/ethnicity. PurposeWe examined beliefs that undergraduate engineering students have about barriers and facilitators to seeking professional help for their mental health. We also sought to identify cultural and systemic factors within and beyond engineering that might affect help‐seeking. Together, these beliefs influence students' sense of personal agency around seeking mental health care. MethodWe implemented a pragmatic qualitative design that incorporated the integrated behavioral model to investigate engineering students' (N = 33) professional mental health help‐seeking beliefs. We used thematic analysis to analyze help‐seeking beliefs and perceived barriers and facilitators that students described during interviews. ResultsWe identified four themes: Navigating the system impacts personal agency; sacrifices associated with help‐seeking act as a barrier; engineering culture acts as a barrier to help‐seeking; and student confidence in help‐seeking varies significantly. These themes portray the effect of perceived barriers and facilitators on students' personal agency for accessing mental health care. Our findings have implications for engineering departments and university counseling centers that want to minimize barriers to help‐seeking. ConclusionsEngineering stakeholders must improve access to professional help for engineering students. Implementing changes to normalize help‐seeking behaviors, enhance personal agency, and facilitate engagement with mental health resources will create better conditions for engineers. Further research is necessary to understand how other beliefs (e.g., attitudes, perceived norms) inform the relationships between student mental health, professional help seeking, and engineering culture.
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Articulating a Succinct Description: An Applied Method for Catalyzing Cultural Change
Articulating a Succinct Description uses ethnographic data to create case study interventions facilitated with people who belong to the culture with whom the ethnographer is engaged. We do so in order to disseminate research findings, address problems presented in the case, and collect additional data for further collective analysis. Further, Articulating a Succinct Description is designed as a means of intervention for underrepresented group members to be heard and gain support and promote equity engagement among majority members in efforts to create more inclusive cultures. In this paper, we validate this method using findings from its application with engineering students at a public university. This method allowed us to view engineering culture not as monolithic, but rather as one with multiple sets of cultural beliefs, values, and behaviors. In particular, we noted a behavior among students we’ve called Swing Staters, who expressed meritocratic beliefs, yet, who we argue, may be critical to reducing bias in engineering education. These findings, analyzed along interwoven threads of race and gender, demonstrate the efficacy of the Articulating a Succinct Description method and contribute to efforts in engineering education to advance pedagogical tools to reduce bias and exclusions in these fields.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1751314
- PAR ID:
- 10325938
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Human Organization
- Volume:
- 80
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0018-7259
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 128 to 139
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.17730/1938-3525-80.2.128
