Students’ Characteristics Influencing Help Seeking Behaviour
Numerous factors including perceptions of social supports as positive, personal coping,
self-efficacy and self-agency, previous experiences with seeking help, gender and age
among others influence the help-seeking behaviour of adolescents. Adolescents approach
a given social support or a decision about help-seeking with past experiences which have
either positive, negative or neutral effects based on those past experiences which in turn
influence subsequent decisions about seeking help. Whether young people trust or view
sources of support as helpful becomes an important factor in help-seeking behaviour.
Research suggests that youth may ignore help-related information because they do not
trust the source or view it as unreliable. Research from Asia and sub-Saharan Africa finds
that even when parents and adolescents report frequent conflict, parents continue to be a
major source of support and adolescents continue to value their connections with their
parents (WHO, 1997).
Personal coping skills, which refer to a young person‟s ability to resolve or the belief that
the person can resolve problems is also an important factor related to help-seeking. Hence
those young people who believe they can solve their own problems may be reluctant to
seek help. Other adolescents may have self-efficacy and self-agency, which refer to the
belief that one has the ability to seek help and that seeking help will make a difference
hence such people may utilise the available venues to access help. Help-seeking is a
learned behaviour, and therefore it is influenced by past experiences of seeking help,
Adolescents who have had negative experiences in seeking help may be reluctant to trust
such persons or services in the future.
However, there has been mixed findings on how the age correlates with seeking help, with
some studies finding that younger adolescents seek more psychological help services (Cohen
and Hesselbart, 1993), whereas other studies have found that older adolescents are more
likely to seek professional help (Sears, 2004) while still others finding out that age is not a
significant determinant of help-seeking. Phillipa (2007) findings on a study on young
peoples‟ help-seeking for depression indicated that those who were over 16 years reported
higher importance of help-seeking. This is consistent with older adolescents having more
positive attitudes to help-seeking and being more positive towards professional help-
seeking sources available than younger adolescents (Dubow, Lovoko, & Kausch, 1990).
While Fallon and Bowles (2001) conservatively concluded that help-seeking behaviour
patterns are already established when people reach adolescence, stage hence finding no
significant effect of age on help-seeking in their study.
Students’ Gender and Help Seeking Behaviour
Students gender has been cited as a significant determinant of students help seeking
behaviour. Most study findings indicate that female students have a more positive attitude
towards seeking counselling help as compared to their male counterparts. A study by
Gregory (2001) on coping style, need for cognition, and college students' attitudes toward
psychological counselling, noted that females were significantly related to more positive
attitudes toward seeking counselling and low fears about counselling than males.
Similarly, Eyo, Joshua and Esuong (2010) in their study found that the gender of the
student had a significant influence on the attitude towards guidance and counselling
services. The female students had a higher mean score on attitude of 22.00 and the male a
lower mean score of 19.00, which implied that female students had a more favourably
attitude towards the school guidance and counselling services than their male
counterparts. This may be explained from the fact that the female gender is more
concerned about relationships and this may make female students to feel it is proper to
seek help when in problem unlike the male gender who may believe that they do not
require other people to overcome their challenges.
On the other hand, a small number of studies have found only minor differences in help-
seeking behaviours between males and females and postulate that other variables such as
lifestyle choices or more traditional masculinity (Galdas, Cheater & Marshall, 2005) are
more important than gender when looking at these gender differences in help-seeking
behaviour. Research has shown that individuals with stereotypical masculine attitudes
have more negative attitudes toward help seeking for psychological issues (Hayes &
Mahalik, 2000). Stereotypical masculine attitudes may include restricting one‟s
emotions, and hence a person tries to avoid feelings that are feminine in nature such as
feelings of vulnerability and caring emotions towards others. The individuals with such
stereotypical masculine attitudes may also be from communities where there is
stigmatisation attached to seeking help by men and in turn such men may be viewed as
weaklings. They may therefore avoid seeking help to avoid being labelled as so. On the
other hand, those male who do not hold such strong masculine attitudes may not have any
problem with seeking help because it is acceptable in their communities.
Perceived Problem Severity and Help-Seeking Behaviour
All people encounter different problems which at times may cause a lot of pain or
distress to the person experiencing them and hence hinder normal functioning. However
same types of problems affect people differently since different people interpret
situations differently. Adolescence stage is characterised as the most distressing stage in
life due to developmental changes, social expectations and emotional changes in this
stage (Papalia & Sally 1992).
Different studies have shown that as the severity of a problem increases the tendency to
seek counselling help increases. Phillipa‟s (2007) found out that, adolescents perceive
formal sources of help as more appropriate for severe symptoms of depression than
informal sources such as friends and family. Adolescents who experience a high level of
impairment and distress are generally more likely to access mental health services. The
severity of problems and the importance of seeking help as a coping strategy have been
found to determine the likelihood of an individual seeking help (Adams & Bromley,
1998). Moghadam (2009) also found that the willingness to self-disclose to a counsellor
and the severity of the problem were significantly related to willingness to seek help for
the problem. The outcomes suggested that the more severe the problem, the more likely
the students would seek counselling. However, in some cases the adolescents will start by
seeking informal counselling and only seek formal counselling as the last resort
(Grinstein-Weiss, Fishman & Eisikovits, 2005).
The different sources of help; formal and informal are important. The students may first
start with informal sources because they are readily available as this help comes from
those people who are close to them like family members, friends, school mates among
others. They might at this point be assuming that those informal connections may be in a
position to get them the solutions they need. Therefore, when it reaches a point and they
realise that the solution is not forthcoming, they may opt for the other
options which include formal sources like teacher counsellors and social workers among
others. Therefore, if the teacher counsellor provides the needed help, the students start
trusting the counsellor as well as guidance and counselling programme and this may lead
to the development of help-seeking behaviour.
