Boundary Conditions for Evidencing the Effectiveness of Researcher Mental Health-Oriented Policies: Designing a Multinetwork Multilevel International Survey Aimed at Benchmarking and Evaluation

Research goals and why the work was worth doing: The aim of this contribution is twofold: First, we will present several networks, and initiatives deriving therefrom, concerned with researcher mental health that members of the EAOHP community may be interested in learning about, joining, and/or collaborating with. Specifically, we will briefly present the Future of Work and Organizational Psychology collective, the Researcher Mental Health (ReMO) COST action, the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), the Online, Open learning recommendations, and mentoring towards Sustainable research CAReers (OSCAR) Erasmus+ project, and the European Partnership for Innovative Campus Unifying Regions (EPICUR) and the state of the art of initiatives focused on researcher mental health that derive from these networks. Second, we will present the contours of an envisaged joint research project aimed at evidencing the effectiveness of researcher mental health-oriented interventions. This work is worth doing because it sets out to shed light on how institutional level variability in policies and practices relate to individual-level researcher mental health. 

Theoretical background: Sustainable researcher mental health is a function of both dispositional and contextual characteristics. In exclusively focusing on the individual, a lot of research bypasses the institutional contexts in which researchers reside. The role of context in sustaining researcher mental health is particularly difficult to examine in quantitative research, however, because it requires cross-institutional variance on policy implementations and interventions. What is needed then is a multilevel approach to the study of researcher mental health in which the impact of individual differences on the one hand, and departmental, organizational, and perhaps even national level policy impacts on the other on researcher mental health can be disentangled. 

Although the mental health crisis in academia and the need for sustainable research careers have been acknowledged, and recommendations have been provided as to what to do about it (Bal et al., 2018; Kismihók, et al. 2019), evidence as to the relative impact of particular policies pertaining to for instance performance management practices, tenure tracks, recognition, mentoring, counseling, and so forth is currently missing. The current endeavor sets out to take a novel approach to this question, by building on (amongst others) the integrative literature review on healthy academic workplaces that is currently being conducted by the Healthy Academia Workgroup of the Future of Work and Organizational Psychology collective and generating testable hypotheses regarding institutional differences in policies that have a bearing on researcher mental health and sustainable research careers.

Design/Methodology/Approach/Intervention: The multilevel study that we are envisaging will entail a large-scale European level data collection initiative, and specifically sets out to become the most encompassing multi-country study on researcher mental health conducted to date. Data collected will be useful, not only to identify those espoused practices that appear to contribute to or harm individual-level mental health, but also for institutions to benchmark their practices pertaining to researcher mental health to those of others. 

Results expected: Next to insight into policy differences across institutions in the European Union in the form of a benchmark, the current endeavor expects to identify institutional level drivers and barriers to researcher mental health and sustainable research careers. Given the scope of this endeavor, results are expected by the time of the 2022 EAOHP Conference.

Limitations: The current endeavor places significant demands not only on hypothesis generation and study design but also, and particularly on the need to collect data on both the institutional and individual levels. In order to evidence the effectiveness of particular policies, a key challenge will lie in formulating these policies in a way that is understandable to university incumbents in different disciplines, contexts, and countries. Furthermore, data collection will entail a significant effort in that we need a large number of countries, universities, and incumbents thereof to be represented in the final sample. We expect to meet these challenges by leveraging the available funds, human resources, and members from the aforementioned networks.

Originality/Value: Performance management systems in academia place constraints on the type of research that is and can be conducted. By leveraging the thrust generated from several European-level initiatives focused on Researcher Mental Health and disseminating a large-scale survey through the membership of these networks, the current project is expected to yield results that are beyond the reach of individual researchers and/or smaller-scale endeavors.