Help-seeking personal agency is a person’s overall self-perceived ability to seek mental health help from a professional. It is important to emphasize the “self-perceived” part of this definition, as a person’s subjective perception of their own ability to seek help may or may not align with their actual objective degree of ability to seek help. Perceptions, whether accurate or inaccurate, drive decision making.
When studying the behavior of seeking help from a mental health professional, “personal agency” is shorthand for “personal agency related to seeking help from a mental health professional.” Help-seeking personal agency is a frequently studied help-seeking construct and is incorporated into certain medical/health/social scientific theories used to studying health services treatment access.
Within the more recent reasoned action tradition theories including the IBM-HS, personal agency has both an autonomy (i.e., degree of self-perceived personal control over seeking help) element and a capacity (i.e., degree of self-perceived confidence in one’s ability to seek help) element that are both shaped by beliefs about barriers and facilitators (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010, Hammer et al., under review; Montaño & Kasprzyk, 2015). Capacity is similar, but not identical, to the concept of self-efficacy (Bandura, 1982). Some barriers/facilitators (e.g., minors’ need for parental permission to seek help) are particularly likely to shape autonomy, whereas others (e.g., lack of information about local mental health providers) are particularly likely to shape capacity. (excerpt from Hammer et al., under review)
In the IBM-HS, personal agency is considered a hierarchical construct defined by two facets: autonomy (sample item: “My seeking help is up to me”) and capacity (sample item: “I am capable of seeking help”). Depending on the sample in question, it may be more appropriate to measure perceived norm with (1) a single personal agency score reflecting an “essentially unidimensional” (Stout, 1990) construct or (2) both a personal agency autonomy score and a personal agency capacity score reflecting a hierarchical construct defined by two correlated first-order factors. Please note that older reasoned action tradition theories have used the term “perceived behavioral control” and this has often been operationalized with a sole focus on autonomy, but we strongly recommend professionals consider using the construct of personal agency (with its dual-facet conceptualization) to maximize comprehensiveness and clarity in future help-seeking research.
We recommend use of the terms “less/more” and “lesser/greater” to quantify the direction of the personal agency construct, and discourage use of terms such as “positive/negative” or “better/worse” that do not carry the same precision.
People will report greater personal agency when they perceive fewer barriers and more facilitators to seeking help (Hammer et al., 2023). There is empirical support for this association between beliefs about barriers and facilitators and personal agency within (Hammer et al., EMHHI) and beyond (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010 Ch4; Montaño & Kasprzyk, 2015) the mental health help-seeking context. Literature (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010) notes that this association is predicated on the assumption that the barriers/facilitators have sufficient perceived power to influence the help seeking process, and some may have more perceived power than others, depending on who is asked.
Help-seeking personal agency is important to study because meta-analytic evidence suggests that personal agency is often a significant predictor of help seeking intention (Adams et al., 2002). As of the time of this writing, Dr. Hammer is not aware of a meta-analysis that has examined the relationship between mental health help-seeking personal agency (or the prior reasoned action tradition term of “perceived behavioral control”) and related constructs. In summary, because people’s personal agency may (it depends on the population in question) influence their behavior via intention (Armitage & Conner, 2001), professionals may be able to increase help seeking behavior for a given population by implementing prevention and intervention programs that improve people’s help seeking personal agency.
A description of available mental health help-seeking personal agency measures can be found on the Personal Agency measures page.