Katey received the NSF CAREER award for her project CAREER: Identifying Aspects of Research that Exacerbate Undergraduate and Graduate Student Depression and Developing Interventions to Improve Student Mental Health!
This $985,868 grant aims to improve the mental health of undergraduate and graduate scientific researchers.
ABSTRACT
This project aims to serve the national interest by advancing the understanding of the relationship between scientific research experiences and depression among undergraduates and graduates, and by developing interventions to improve student mental health. Depression is one of the top mental health concerns among undergraduate and graduate students and disproportionately impacts those who are already underserved in science, including women, first-generation college students, individuals from low socioeconomic backgrounds, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and people with disabilities. Recent research has established that aspects of scientific research experiences can exacerbate depressive symptoms. However, it is unknown what aspects of research that exacerbate depression are most commonly experienced by students, which aspects of research are most detrimental to student mental health, and whether specific aspects of research disproportionately affect depression for particular student groups. This CAREER project will address these gaps in the literature using interview and survey studies. Additionally, the project will develop brief, self-guided online interventions designed to help undergraduate and graduate researchers productively cope with challenges in research that can worsen mental health. This project will integrate research and teaching by developing biology education course-based undergraduate research experiences that will be offered to students enrolled in Arizona State University’s online life sciences Bachelor of Science degree programs. Online students will engage in authentic research activities focused on the relationship between science education and depression.
The goal of this project is to use an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design to examine the relationship between scientific research and depressive symptoms among undergraduate and graduate students in the life sciences. Additionally, the project aims to develop and evaluate single-session interventions to help undergraduate and graduate students cope with aspects of scientific research that can exacerbate depressive symptoms. Specifically, exploratory interview studies will further probe why biology undergraduate and graduate students perceive that aspects of research exacerbate, and sometimes alleviate, depressive symptoms, as well as identify moderators of the relationship between research and student depression. These studies will also explore potential targets for creating more inclusive research environments. The findings from the interviews will inform national survey studies to assess the relationship between research and depression among biology undergraduate and graduate students at scale and what approaches undergraduate and graduate researchers perceive would be most effective in transforming research spaces to be more inclusive. The results of these studies will be used to develop single-session interventions to help students cope with common challenges in research; the interventions will be easy to administer, independent of instructors or mentors, freely available, and deliverable to students at scale. To integrate research and teaching with the intent to build a foundational body of research on the relationship between science education and depression, and to normalize mental health concerns among students, biology education course-based undergraduate research experiences will be developed and taught to students in Arizona State University’s online life sciences Bachelor of Science degree programs. This approach will deliver authentic research experiences to a population of students who have very few research opportunities and who often report higher rates of depression than their peers completing degrees in person. Funding for this award is being provided by the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education program and the NSF Research Traineeship program in recognition of the alignment of the project with the aims of these two programs that focus on the undergraduate and graduate STEM education enterprises, respectively.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
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