Conceptualizing Well-being in Physics Education Research: A Scoping Review of Definitions and Frameworks

Interest in STEM education research on mental health and well-being has grown as researchers increasingly attend to the interpersonal and environmental factors within the discipline. Definitions of mental health and well-being are disparate even within fields where these topics are a primary focus, which makes precision around the use of these common terms essential for clear communication. We conducted a scoping literature review on the use of well-being and mental health in physics education research to explore how researchers are using these terms. We identified around 50 articles that used well-being and/or mental health when discussing research on physics education. Of these studies, only five included an explicit framework for well-being. The remaining articles either discussed the topic without a formal definition or framework or mentioned well-being/mental health only briefly without connecting it to the study's findings. We will describe the explicit well-being frameworks used in physics education research and analyze trends in the conceptual engagement of both well-being and mental health across the literature. We conclude with a call for researchers to be explicit about definitions of well-being and mental health to facilitate understanding and comparison across studies.