In terms of the need and rationale for a new help-seeking model, the IBM-HS was developed because:
- most help-seeking research is a-theoretical, meaning that it is not grounded in a scientific theory/framework/model. It is important to ground one’s scholarly or applied help-seeking work in a theory, because a theory provides guidance on what things to study and how to study them properly. The IBM-HS is designed to accessible to both scholarly and applied professionals, so that they can ground their help-seeking investigations in a theory that will help them more efficiently meet their goals.
- related to the above, different professionals who study mental health help seeking often conceptualize and measure the help-seeking process and help-seeking constructs in inconsistent ways, even when working from the same theory. Such inconsistency can create confusion among users of the help-seeking literature, produce poorer quality science, impede cross-study comparisons and meta-analyses, and slow progress toward identifying and implementing evidence-based intervention to close the treatment gap in underserved populations. Thus, the IBM-HS offers detailed measurement guidelines on how to validly operationalize its theoretical constructs across disparate sociodemographic populations.
- the reasoned action scholarly tradition features some the most well-developed, researched, and influential theories of behavior used by health/social scientists. This theoretical tradition offers a strong foundation for studying help-seeking. However, the reasoned action theories are generic theories of behavior that must be adapted to specific behaviors (e.g., voting, speeding, recycling, cancer screening) and there are unique challenges to studying each possible type of behavior. Studying mental health help seeking is particularly challenging, for a host of reasons. Therefore, while the reasoned action tradition is useful, the application of this tradition to the study of mental health help-seeking is filled with dilemmas, challenging barriers, and tricky research method decisions. Having experimented with various ways of applying the reasoned action tradition to the study of mental health help-seeking, Dr. Hammer and his colleagues have identified workable solutions to these challenges, and decided to formalize these solutions as a new theoretical model, the IBM-HS, that leverages the strengths of the reasoned action tradition but tailors it to the unique context of studying the mental health help-seeking process.
- The help-seeking process is complex and can be shaped by hundreds of constructs. Therefore, a rigorous investigation of help seeking requires a strategy for accounting for this complexity. The IBM-HS provides a framework for organizing these constructs into a causal sequence of categories in a manner that makes understanding and studying the help-seeking process easier and less chaotic. It provides flexibility for end-users, such that they do not have to study these hundreds of constructs all at once, but can instead select a subset of constructs that best suit their professional goals and their population of interest. The IBM-HS provides guidance on how these constructs may relate to each other, including causal effects (e.g., what independent variables influence which dependent variables), mediation effects (e.g., what mediating mechanisms account for why a given independent variable has a causal impact on a given dependent variable), and moderation effects (e.g., what moderating constructs influence whether and how a given independent variable has an effect on a given dependent variable) that may be operating in the help-seeking process.
- when studying the help-seeking process, it can be easy to fail to account for the powerful role that structural forces and cultural factors can play in shaping people’s help-seeking perceptions and behaviors. The IBM-HS provides concrete guidance on how professionals can better attend to the role of these things in their investigations, which can provide a more accurate and equitable understanding of what helps and stops people form seeking mental health care. This more comprehensive picture can, in turn, help professionals intervene at multiple levels (e.g., individual, group, structural) to more effectively close the treatment gap for their population of interest, particularly marginalized populations and marginalized individuals within a larger population.