Board 310: Improving the Validity of an Instrument to Measure Mental Health Help-Seeking Beliefs for Diverse Institutional Contexts

National data show that engineering students experiencing mental health distress are significantly less likely than their peers to seek professional psychological help. While treatment gaps exist for cisgender men, persons of color, and first-generation students, disparities are further pronounced in engineering. Interventions targeted at reshaping engineering culture to support professional mental health help seeking could increase academic success and retention while improving the mental health of the workforce. Utilizing results from an NSF Research Initiation in Engineering Formation grant, this Research in the Formation of Engineers proposal applies a mixed-methods approach to improve and refine an Engineering Mental Health Help-seeking Instrument (EMHHI) based on the Integrated Behavioral Model (IBM) to characterize key mental health help-seeking beliefs in diverse undergraduate students. Through this project, we will identify key help-seeking beliefs that can illuminate intrapersonal, interpersonal, and structural targets for mental health help-seeking interventions in varied institutional contexts nationally. The EMHHI was designed to measure beliefs relevant to engineering students with diverse identities at a research-focused, predominantly White institution. Therefore, over the first year of the project, we aimed to ensure that the instrument was inclusive of help-seeking beliefs of students at other institutions. Through collaborations with a Historically Black College or University and a Hispanic-serving Institution, we conducted focus groups to identify novel beliefs that were not represented within the first version of the EMHHI. Through this process, beliefs were identified such as, “My seeking help from a mental health professional in the next 3 months…”: 1) would require me to work with someone who doesn't understand my cultural background, 2) would make me feel overwhelmed or defeated and 3) would make me feel like an imposter in engineering. These novel beliefs were incorporated into an improved version of the instrument that improved the validity of the instrument to measure mental health beliefs across diverse institutional contexts. Moving forward, the instrument will be used in large-scale studies to determine mental health help-seeking beliefs that predict intention to seek help for a mental health concern. These beliefs will inform mental health interventions with a goal of improving help seeking within the undergraduate engineering student population.