Help-seeking outcome beliefs, which is one type of help-seeking belief, are incorporated into certain medical/health/social scientific theories used to studying health services treatment access. When studying the behavior of seeking help from a mental health professional, “outcome beliefs” is shorthand for “outcome beliefs related to seeking help from a mental health professional.”
Measures of mental health help-seeking outcome beliefs are less commonly found in the literature, compared to measures of other more popular help-seeking constructs. This is true of all mental health help-seeking belief measures.
For example, Bayer and Peay (2007) were some of the earliest scholars to develop and use a help-seeking outcome beliefs measure, which they called a measure of “behavioural beliefs”. They asked 20 participants to list perceived advantages and disadvantages of seeking help from a mental health professional if they were experiencing a persistent personal problem in their lives (p. 506). These perceived outcomes were included as items in their outcome beliefs measure, with each item rated on a 7-point scale from -3 (unlikely) to +3 (likely). This outcome belief measure consisted of an instructional stem plus 5 items that completed that stem:
My seeking help from a mental health professional if I were experiencing a persistent personal problem in my life would result in…
- …receiving help with a persistent personal problem
- …experiencing acceptance, understanding and confidentiality.
- …feeling inadequate.
- …using up a lot of time and money.
- …dealing with a person who is difficult to relate to.
To score this 5-item outcome beliefs measure, users would sum the products of each outcome belief item score and its associated “outcome evaluation” item score. (The outcome evaluation items asked respondents to rate on a 7-point scale how bad versus good they think it would be if a given outcome occurred. There was one matching evaluation item for each of the 5 outcome belief items.)
Bayer and Peay (2007) did not conduct a psychometric investigation of their outcome belief measure.
Our research team published a paper (Hammer et al., 2024) that developed and documented psychometric evidence of validity for a battery of mental health help seeking measures, for use with a specific group of humans (i.e., undergraduate engineering students studying in the United States). A copy of the mental health help-seeking outcome beliefs measure from that battery can be found in the supplemental material associated with that 2024 article.
Visit the beliefs measures webpage to learn more about the population-specific nature of beliefs measures and what that means for professionals wishing to use such measures in their work.