258 The Professional Counselor | Volume 12, Issue 3 place STEM students at risk for mental distress—for example, maladaptive perfectionism (Rice et al., 2015), high-pressure academic environments (Shapiro & Sax, 2011), and difficulty recognizing warning signs for mental distress (Kalkbrenner, James, & Pérez-Rojas, 2022). Once STEM students learn about these socio-personal factors, the presentation content can shift to psychoeducation about the utility of counseling for improving both personal and academic outcomes (Lockard et al., 2019). The RFSV Scale can also be administered on more targeted levels, for example, to specific groups of STEM students who might be particularly vulnerable to mental health distress. There might be utility in administering the RFSV Scale to male STEM students considering that we found male STEM students were more sensitive to the Value barrier than female STEM students. College counselors can use the RFSV results to identify specific barriers (e.g., Value) that might be making STEM students on their campus unlikely to access counseling services. Such results can be used to inform thes curriculum of mental health programming (e.g., peer-to-peer support initiatives). When working with male STEM students, college counselors might consider the intersectionality of academic pressure (Lipson et al., 2016) and gender-role–based mental health stressors (Neukrug et al., 2013) they might be facing. In all likelihood, considering the intersectionality between these socio-personal factors will help college counselors address their clients’ presenting concerns holistically. Limitations and Future Research The methodological limitations of this research should be reviewed when considering the implications of the results. The preset data were collected from STEM students in three different cities located in the Southwestern United States; however, results might not generalize to STEM students in other geographical locations. Future researchers can validate RFSV scores with national and international samples of STEM students. Moreover, the findings of cross-sectional research designs are correlational, which prevents researchers from drawing conclusions regarding cause-and-effect. Now that STEM students’ scores on the RFSV Scale are validated, future investigators can extend this line of inquiry by conducting outcome research on the effectiveness of interventions geared toward promoting the utilization of mental health support services among STEM students. Although factor analytic results in the present study were promising, STEM students are not a homogenous group. To this end, future investigators can extend this line of research by conducting factorial invariance testing to examine the psychometric equivalence of RFSV scores across subgroups of STEM students. As just one example, past investigators (e.g., Shapiro & Sax, 2011) found differences in STEM students’ mental health by gender identity. Relatedly, our results did not reveal demographic differences by race/ethnicity in STEM students’ vulnerability to barriers to counseling. However, we used a dummy-coding procedure to create racial/ethnic identity comparison groups (Latinx, White, or other ethnicity) that were large enough for statistical analyses. Clustering participants with racial/ethnic identities other than White or Latinx into one group might have masked significant findings within the other race/ethnicity group. It is also possible that some participants identified as White and Latinx, as White is a racial category and Latinx is an ethnic category. Future researchers should examine potential disparities in barriers to counseling among more racially and ethnically diverse samples of STEM students. In an extension of the extant literature on samples of primarily male STEM students, the present study included notably more (> 50%) female STEM students when compared to a national demographic profile of STEM students (NCES, 2020). However, the findings of the present study might not generalize to STEM students with gender identities that extend beyond only male or female. Accordingly, future researchers can test the invariance of RFSV scores with more gender-diverse samples.
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