NATIONALITY AS A FACTOR UNDERPINNING STUDENTS’ ATTITUDES TOWARD SEEKING PSYCHOLOGICAL HELP

Abstract

Student life often involves separating from home, parents and parental support, so for students it, not rarely, presents a quite challenging, difficult and stressful period of life. For these reasons, students become the users of psychological counseling services. The aim of this paper is to explore whether students’ nationality is an important factor contributing to the development of attitudes toward seeking psychological help. As the instrument we used a Scale for Attitudes toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help comprising four subscales: recognition of the need for psychological help, the tolerance of stigma associated with seeking psychological help, interpersonal openness toward somebody else’s problems, and confidence in mental health professionals. The sample consisted of 600 students, coming from three countries: Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Turkey. The research was carried out using an online questionnaire. The results indicate that there are differences between the students of different nationalities, but visible only on the scale of recognition of the need for psychological help, with Croatian students showing the greatest tendency to recognize the need, in contrast to the students from Turkey and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Gender differences were also significant on the subscale of stigma tolerance in all three nationalities, with women obtaining a significantly higher score, while the interaction of nationality and gender was statistically significant for all four variables.