Abstract
Background: Undergraduate engineering students experiencing distress are less likely than peers to ask for professional help. A population-specific instrument to facilitate the identification of factors that influence mental healthcare utilization could guide development and testing of interventions to increase help seeking.
Purpose: We used mixed methods guided by the Integrated Behavioral Model (IBM) to develop and evaluate the Undergraduate Engineering Mental Health Help-Seeking Instrument (UE-MH-HSI).
Method: First, we adapted existing measures of mental health help-seeking intention and mechanisms (i.e., attitudes, perceived norm: injunctive, perceived norm: descriptive, personal agency: autonomy, personal agency: capacity). Second, we coded qualitative interviews (N = 33) to create population-specific mental health help-seeking belief measures (i.e., outcome beliefs, experiential beliefs, beliefs about others' expectations, beliefs about others' behavior, beliefs about barriers and facilitators). Third, we tested the psychometric properties using data from 596 undergraduate engineering students at a historically White, research-focused institution in southern United States.
Results: Psychometric analyses indicated that (1) help-seeking mechanism and intention measures demonstrated unidimensionality, internal consistency, con- struct replicability, and sufficient variability; (2) mechanism measures demon- strated criterion evidence of validity; and (3) most items within the belief measures demonstrated sufficient variability and convergent evidence of validity.
Conclusions: The UE-MH-HSI is an evidence-based tool for investigating mental health help-seeking factors and their relationship to help-seeking behavior, well-being, academic success, and engineering identity formation. Guidelines for use are provided.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
10-2024
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1002/jee.20615
Funding Information
This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (Award Number 2024394). Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in the material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the National Science Foundation.
Repository Citation
Hammer, Joseph H.; Wright, Courtney J.; Miller, Melanie E.; and Wilson, Sarah A., "The Undergraduate Engineering Mental Health Help-Seeking Instrument (UE-MH-HSI): Development and validity evidence" (2024). Chemical and Materials Engineering Faculty Publications. 86.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cme_facpub/86
Included in
Chemical Engineering Commons, Education Commons, Materials Science and Engineering Commons
Notes/Citation Information
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. © 2024 The Author(s). Journal of Engineering Education published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Engineering Education.