Welcome to HelpSeekingResearch.com
The mission of HelpSeekingResearch.com is to provide people with evidence-based advice on how to conduct high-quality help-seeking research on the constructs (i.e., things, forces, factors, variables, influences) that help or stop people from accessing professional mental health health care. The study of these factors includes medical and social science research on “help seeking,” “treatment access,” “health services,” “health care seeking,” and “health care utilization.” This research is essential due to the existence of mental health treatment gaps in most countries and populations, where only a fraction of people who would benefit from professional mental health treatment access it.
This website is maintained by Joseph H. Hammer, PhD. Dr. Hammer is a Licensed Psychologist and tenured Associate Professor of counseling psychology who leads the Help-seeking And Multicultural Measurement Evaluation Research (HAMMER) Lab in the Department of Educational, School, and Counseling Psychology (EDP) at the University of Kentucky (UK) in the United States of America (USA). Dr. Hammer has been conducting help-seeking research since 2009. The primary aim of his program of research is to provide scholarly and applied professionals with the evidence-based theoretical and measurement resources to conduct high quality investigations into what helps or stops people in their population of interest from seeking mental health care.
This website is a work in progress, and will grow in breadth and depth over time. For now, this website is primarily focused on providing a basic introduction to the Integrated Behavioral Model of Mental Health Help Seeking (IBM-HS) and an overview of psychometrically-sound self-report survey measures that are suitable measures of popular help-seeking constructs, such as those embedded in the IBM-HS.
Please use the topside website menu bar to navigate to the topics of most interest to you. You may also see a comprehensive list of all pages on this website by visiting our SiteMap page, where you can click on a given page to be taken to it.