The investigation of university students' psychological help seeking attitudes

This study has attempted to present the nature of the university students' psychological help seeking attitudes. For this purpose, firstly the levels of university students' help seeking attitude and opinions have been described. And then, their personality traits, automatic thoughts, cultural characteristics and stress coping strategies have been examined in terms of how they predict their professional psychological help seeking attitudes. Moreover, the predictabilities of such variables have also been examined for the groups that have previously sought psychological help and the groups have never sought psychological help in the past. The study has been conducted with the participation of a total of 1284 students studying in Anadolu University, namely 739 female students (61.4%), 493 male students (38.4%) and 2 students who did not state their gender. As measuring tools, Attitude Towards Seeking Professional Psychological Help Scale-Short Form, Basic Personality Traits Inventory, Automatic Thoughts Scale, IND-COL Scale and Ways of Coping Questionary have been used. Having obtained qualitative and quantitative data in the study, the Pearson correlation analysis and hierarchical regression analysis have been used evaluate the quantitative data. The analysis of the qualitative data, however, has been carried out by using an inductive analysis. The study findings suggest that the students' psychological help seeking attitudes are at a moderate level. Moreover, the qualitative data shows that the students' opinions for seeking psychological help are gathered under seven main themes that include economical factors, perception errors, counselors' competency, self-disclosure, experience of seeking help, alternative coping strategies and expected benefit from the consultant. As predictors of the psychological help seeking attitude, however, the following student personality traits have been found to be statistically significant predictors: negative valence, conscientiousness, openness to experience and agreeableness; and keep to self, social support and escape-avoidance coping strategies; collectivistic culture characteristic, and gender. When the predictabilities of such variables have been examined in the group that has previously sought psychological help, the following personality traits have been found to be statistically significant predictors: negative valence, openness to experience and keep to self. Finally, in the group that has never sought psychological help, the following personality traits have been found to be significant predictors: negative valence, agreeableness, openness to experience and conscientiousness; keep to self, social support and escape-avoidance coping strategies; collectivistic culture characteristic, and gender. As a conclusion, it can be argued that the personality traits, cultural characteristics, stress coping methods and gender of the students play a significant role in shaping up their psychological help seeking attitudes.