Help-seeking intention is a person’s readiness/motivation to exert effort to seek mental health help from a professional.
When studying the behavior of seeking help from a mental health professional, “intention” is shorthand for “intention to seek help from a mental health professional.” Help-seeking intention is one of the most frequently studied help-seeking constructs and is incorporated into certain medical/health/social scientific theories used to study health services treatment access.
In the IBM-HS and the wider reasoned action tradition, intention is considered a unidimensional construct, which should be measured with a single intention score.
We recommend using the singular term “intention” (as opposed to the plural “intentions”) to describe this construct, as this emphasizes its unidimensional nature. We also recommend use of the terms “greater” and “lesser” to quantify the strength of the intention construct, with intention conceptualized as ranging from no intention to strong intention. Typically, a low score on intention does NOT necessarily indicate that the person explicitly intends to purposely avoid seeking help, but instead signifies the absence of intention.
The IBM-HS suggests that the three help-seeking mechanisms of attitude, perceived norm, and personal agency collectively lead to the formation of intention (i.e., readiness to exert effort to seek mental health help from a professional; Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010). In general, people with a more favorable attitude, perceived norm, and personal agency will form a greater intention to seek help. Those with less favorable perceptions will form less (or no) intention to seek help. However, the degree of relative influence that a mediator has on help-seeking intention varies from person to person and from population to population (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010). In their review of several meta-analyses of the association between these mediators and intention across a wide variety of behaviors, Fishbein and Ajzen (2010) note that the mean correlations with intention were as follows: attitude (r = .45 to .60), perceived norm (r = .34 to .42), and personal agency (r = .35 to .46). In their scoping review of mental health help-seeking studies using the TPB, Adams and colleagues (2022) found that intention was associated with attitude (true in 90% of the n = 39 studies reviewed), perceived norm (59%), and personal agency (87%).
The IBM-HS and the wider reasoned action tradition assert that help-seeking intention is the primary antecedent to prospective help-seeking behavior. Indeed, research indicates that intention is one of the best predictors of prospective behavior within (Adams et al., 2022; Hammer et al., 2018) and outside (Armitage & Conner, 2001; Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010) of the mental health help-seeking context. However, intention is necessary but not sufficient for seeking help (Montaño & Kasprzyk, 2015), as certain constructs can moderate the degree to which intention translates into prospective behavior.
Intention is conceptualized as the primary causal mechanism through which attitude, perceived norm, and personal agency drive prospective help-seeking behavior. Measuring prospective help-seeking behavior requires substantial research resources to operationalize via longitudinal and experimental design. Thus, researchers often choose to measure help-seeking intention, the closest measurable proxy of actual help-seeking behavior, via a self-report intention instrument.
A description of available mental health help-seeking intention measures can be found on the Intention measures page.
(Please note: select page content is excerpted from Hammer et al., 2024.)