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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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Seeking help as a strategy for ethical and professional decision-making in research: Perspectives of researchers from East Asia and the United States
Background: A person’s cultural background shapes how they interpret and navigate problems. Given that large numbers of international researchers work and train in the U.S. we sought to better understand how researchers use the decision-making strategy of seeking help to navigate ethical and professional challenges.Methods: Participants (N = 300) were researchers working or training in the U.S. who were born in East Asia (EA) or born in the U.S. They completed a screening survey; then a subset completed think-aloud interviews (n = 66) focused on how they would respond to three hypothetical research scenarios.Results: Thematic analysis of the transcripts showed that seeking help was a commonly endorsed strategy, with some nuances between groups. Themes included seeking help in the form of getting advice, seeking someone to help solve the problem, and gathering information. Endorsement of the seeking help strategy frequently depended on participants’ relationships; desiring to seek help from people they trusted. Notably, EA participants tended to prefer seeking help in ways that avoided reputational harm to others.Conclusion: A better understanding of how researchers from different cultural backgrounds use decision-making strategies can inform how to make educational programs more inclusive and comprehensive to more effectively develop researchers’ ethical and professional decision-making skills.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2024345
- PAR ID:
- 10561042
- Publisher / Repository:
- Accountability in Research
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Accountability in Research
- ISSN:
- 0898-9621
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 23
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Responsible conduct of research training professional decision-making research ethics seeking help SMART strategies
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1080/08989621.2024.2360945
