Academic Help-Seeking Attitudes, and Their Relationship with Emotional Variables

Abstract

Academic help seeking is a self-regulatory strategy that is closely related to students’ school functioning and successful school outcomes. The aim of the present study is to gain greater insight into the associations between help-seeking behavior and attitudes (i.e., emotional costs, perception of benefits, threats and avoidance of academic help seeking), and socio-emotional factors (i.e., functional social support, satisfaction with life, happiness, academic and social self-concept, emotional loneliness and social network). Two hundred and thirty-two students from three public secondary schools (53.9% girls; mean age = 16.61, SD = 2.85) participated in this study by completing the assessment form during school hours. As expected, the results showed significant associations between attitudes toward academic help seeking and socioemotional factors except for (1) perceived emotional cost of academic help seeking and happiness, academic self-concept and social network, (2) threat of academic help seeking and satisfaction with life and social network and (3) avoidance of academic help seeking and social network, in which cases the correlations were not significant. Finally, (1) emotional loneliness was found to be a significant predictor of the perceived emotional cost of academic help seeking, (2) functional social support, academic self-concept, social self-concept and subjective evaluation of the social network were found to be significant predictors of the perceived benefits of academic help seeking, (3) emotional loneliness and academic self-concept were found to be significant predictors of both threat of academic help seeking and avoidance of academic help seeking. The results of this study suggest that psycho-emotional variables play an important role in academic help-seeking strategies and can affect students’ final behavior in help seeking.