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

Measures of mental health help-seeking beliefs of others’ expectations 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 beliefs about others’ expectations measure, which they called a measure of “normative beliefs”. They asked 20 participants to list the groups or people (i.e., salient referents) who would approve or disapprove of their seeking help from a mental health professional if they were experiencing a persistent personal problem in their lives (p. 506). These referents were included as items in their beliefs about others’ expectations measure, with each item rated on a 7-point scale from -3 (unlikely) to +3 (likely).

This beliefs about others’ expectations measure consisted of 3 items:

  1. Most members of my family would think that I should seek help from a mental health professional if I were experiencing a persistent personal problem in my life.
  2. Most of my friends would think that I should seek help.
  3. My doctor would think that I should seek help.

To score this 3-item measure, users would sum the products of each beliefs about others’ expectations item score and its associated “motivation to comply” item score. (The motivation to comply items asked respondents to rate on a 7-point scale how unlikely versus likely they are to want to do what that referent thinks they should do. There was one matching motivation to comply item for each of the 3 beliefs about others’ expectations items.)

Bayer and Peay (2007) did not conduct a psychometric investigation of their beliefs about others’ expectations 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 beliefs about others’ expectations 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.