An Investigation of a Cultural Help-Seeking Model for Professional Psychological Services With U.S. and Chinese Samples

Abstract

Help-seeking processes for participants in the People’s Republic of China and the United States were modeled in the present study. The decision to seek professional services for mental health problems (e.g., psychotherapy) has been primarily studied by applying principles from the theory of planned behavior and reasoned action (TPB). Application of the TPB has commonly been used with a three-level empirical model of help-seeking, whereby expectations/barriers to help-seeking predict attitudes toward therapy, which in turn predicts intentions and behaviors to seek professional help. Informed by the TPB, the present study added a cultural-contextual level to the model to account for the role of cultural identity variables, which included independent and interdependent self-construal as well as gender. The resulting four-level model, the cultural help-seeking (CHS) model, was compared with the conventional three-level help-seeking model using data collected from 296 college students from Mainland China and 334 college students from the United States. Separate analyses were conducted for the Chinese group and American group. Chinese versions of the questionnaires were developed for the present study using translation and back-translation procedures. Using structural regression modeling, the four-level CHS model provided a better fit than the three-level traditional model for both the U.S. and Chinese samples. However, the specific decisional pathways within this four-level model were structurally different for the U.S. and Chinese samples. Findings suggest that including cultural-contextual variables as a first level of the professional help-seeking model is supported by both samples.