The Undergraduate Engineering Mental Health Help-Seeking Instrument (UE-MH-HSI): Development and validity evidence

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, construct replicability, and sufficient variability; (2) mechanism measures demonstrated 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.