Co-Designing for Graduate Student Mental Health: An Example of Participatory Research Methods in PER

In this work we present an example of participatory research methodologies: a co-design session.The session was an early stage of the development of a broader study of graduate student mental health, and it provided critical insights that helped shape the study design.This paper first motivates studying graduate student mental health and then describes our co-design process in detail.We discuss the particular activities performed and the motivations for each activity, foregrounding our design choices and how these choices attended to participant psychological safety.We finally describe participants' evaluation of the session as well as themes from the session that shaped the subsequent study design.This work highlights the value of meaningfully including members of a study population in the design and interpretation of physics education research studies.