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It is well-known that a significant population of doctoral students drop out of their graduate programs and face or develop significant mental health distress. Stress plays a role in exacerbating mental health distress in both engineering PhD programs and more broadly for university students in general. While rates of dropout for engineering students may not differ strongly from other disciplines, engineering students have been suggested to be less likely to seek help from university services for well-being concerns. In the first year of our three‐year NSF RFE project, we interviewed doctoral engineering students to identify major stressors present in the doctoral engineering experience at the present study’s focal institution. In the second year of our project, we had developed the Stressors for Doctoral Students Questionnaire - Engineering (SDSQ-E), a novel survey which measures the frequency and severity of these top sources of stress for doctoral engineering students. The SDSQ-E was designed using the results of first year interviews and a review of the literature on stress for doctoral engineering students. In year three, we completed analysis of the year 3 data and conducted further testing of the SDSQ-E. We also developed a discipline-general form of the survey, called the SDSQ-G. In October-December 2023, we administered these surveys to engineering PhD students as a subset of a large sample of graduate students at two institutions. Further, we tested the potential for the SDSQ-E to predict factors such as anxiety, depression, or intention to persist in doctoral programs. We broadly summarize these survey distributions including tests of the SDSQ-E for validity, fairness, and reliability.
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The Stressors for Doctoral Students Questionnaire: Year 2 of an RFE project on understanding graduate engineering student well-being and retention
Drawing from the results of this study and a review of the literature on graduate student stressors, we developed in Year 2 the Stressors for Doctoral Students Questionnaire for Engineering (SDSQ-E) and administered it twice, in fall 2022 and in spring 2023. The SDSQ-E measures the severity and frequency of stressors including advisor-related stressors, class-taking stressors, research or laboratory stressors, campus life and financial stressors, and identity-related or microaggression-related stressors. We present a description of our project and updates on its progress in its second year, including survey results from our 2022-2023 data collection.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2034800
- PAR ID:
- 10488117
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASEE Annual Conference Paper Repository
- Date Published:
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- https://nemo.asee.org/public/conferences/327/papers/37526/view
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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