Help-seeking beliefs 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, “beliefs” is shorthand for “beliefs related to seeking help from a mental health professional.”

According to the IBM-HS, there are five types of help-seeking beliefs, each of which should be measured with population-specific self-report survey measures. To learn more about measurement options for these five types, visit the webpages below:

As noted by Hammer and colleagues (2024): help-seeking beliefs are often measured with indirect measures—measures composed of a set of items that are not required to be intercorrelated, internally consistent, or averaged to create a mean score (Coltman et al., 2008, p. 1252). Generally, indirect measures are not analyzed at the mean level because their items are topically heterogenous, not interchangeable, and often have varying associations with antecedents/consequences. Hence, calculating a mean score for an indirect measure often produces an index of limited utility. Instead, indirect measures are analyzed at the individual item level, as this permits the user to determine how the endorsement of specific beliefs (e.g., my seeking help would help me feel better, my seeking help would threaten my career prospects) explains a population’s attitude, perceived norm, personal agency, and, ultimately, intention to seek help… although the IBM-HS recommends the use of indirect measures of help-seeking beliefs, there exist some direct measures of constructs that the IBM-HS would consider to be measures of help-seeking beliefs, such as the Self-Stigma of Seeking Help Scale (Vogel et al., 2006; sample item: “I would feel inadequate if I went to a therapist for psychological help”).

Our research team has just published a paper (Hammer et al., 2024) that developed and documented psychometric evidence of validity for mental health help-seeking beliefs measures for each of the five types of beliefs, for use with a specific group of humans (i.e., undergraduate engineering students studying in the United States).

However, beliefs measures designed to be congruent with the reasoned action tradition (e.g., Theory of Reasoned Action, Theory of Planned Behavior, Integrated Behavioral Model of Mental Health Help Seeking), are meant to be population-specific. According to this tradition, beliefs are supposed to be assessed with survey measures tailored to the specific behavior and population under study (Montaño & Kasprzyk, 2015). Therefore, professionals who wish to comprehensively measure the most important beliefs that shape the mental health help seeking decision making of their population of interest will need to use mixed methods (qualitative and quantitative methods in combination) to develop beliefs measures tailored to their population.

Our research team has shared initial guidance on develop such beliefs measures (see the IBM-HS mixed-method protocol webpage) and has plans to publish case study/procedural papers (e.g., Hammer et al., 2024) that will help other professionals adapt and/or develop beliefs measures for their own populations of interest.