250 The Professional Counselor | Volume 12, Issue 3 The literature is lacking research on why STEM students tend to seek counseling at lower rates than non-STEM students. One of the first steps in supporting STEM students’ mental health is validating scores on a screening tool for identifying barriers to accessing mental health support services among STEM students. Although screening tools that appraise barriers to counseling exist, none of them have been validated with STEM students. The Revised Fit, Stigma, and Value (RFSV) Scale is a screening tool for appraising barriers to counseling that has been normed with non–college-based populations (e.g., adults in the United States; Kalkbrenner & Neukrug, 2018) and college students with mental health backgrounds (e.g., graduate counseling students; Kalkbrenner & Neukrug, 2019), as just a few examples. When compared to the existing normative RFSV Scale samples, STEM students are a distinct college student population who utilize counseling services at lower rates than students in mental health majors (e.g., psychology; Kalkbrenner, James, & PérezRojas, 2022). The psychometric properties of instrumentation can fluctuate significantly between different populations, and researchers and practitioners have an ethical obligation to validate scores on instruments before interpreting the results with untested populations (Mvududu & Sink, 2013). Accordingly, the primary aims of the present study were to validate STEM students’ scores on the RFSV Scale (Kalkbrenner & Neukrug, 2019), test the capacity of RFSV scores for predicting referrals to the counseling center, and investigate demographic differences in STEM students’ RFSV scores. The Revised Fit, Stigma, and Value (RFSV) Scale Neukrug et al. (2017) developed and validated scores on the original version of the Fit, Stigma, and Value (FSV) Scale for appraising barriers to counseling among a large sample of human services professionals. The FSV Scale contains the three following subscales or latent traits behind why one would be reluctant to seek personal counseling: Fit, Stigma, and Value. Kalkbrenner et al. (2019) validated scores on a more concise version of the FSV Scale, which became known as the RFSV Scale, which includes the same three subscales as the original version. Building on this line of research, Kalkbrenner and Neukrug (2019) found a higher-order factor, the Global Barriers to Counseling scale. The Global Barriers to Counseling scale is composed of a total composite score across the three single-order subscales (Fit, Stigma, and Value). Accordingly, the Fit, Stigma, and Value subscales can be scored separately and/or users can compute a total score for the higher-order Global Barriers to Counseling scale. Scores on the RFSV Scale have been validated with a number of non-college populations, including adults in the United States (Kalkbrenner & Neukrug, 2018), professional counselors (Kalkbrenner et al., 2019), counselors-in-training (Kalkbrenner & Neukrug, 2019), and high school students (Kalkbrenner, Goodman-Scott, & Neukrug, 2020). If scores are validated with STEM students, the RFSV Scale could be used to enhance professional counselors’ mental health screening efforts to understand and promote STEM student mental health. Specifically, campus-wide mental health screening has implications for promoting peer-to-peer mental health support. For example, college counselors are implementing peer-to-peer mental health support initiatives by training students to recognize warning signs of mental distress in their peers and, in some instances, refer them to college counseling services (Kalkbrenner, Sink, & Smith, 2020). Peer-to-Peer Mental Health Support College students tend to discuss mental health concerns with their peers more often than with a faculty member or student affairs professional (Wawrzynski et al., 2011; Woodhead et al., 2021). To this end, the popularity and utility of peer-to-peer mental health support initiatives has grown in recent years (Kalkbrenner, Lopez, & Gibbs, 2020; Olson et al., 2016). The effectiveness of these peer-topeer support initiatives can be evaluated by test scores (e.g., scores on mental distress and well-being inventories) as well as non-test criteria (e.g., increases in the frequency of peer-to-peer mental health
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