In plain language
Whether a distressed young person reaches out for help—and to whom—can be a matter of enormous consequence, especially when suicidal thoughts are involved. Yet research on help-seeking had been hampered by inconsistent, poorly validated measures, making it impossible to compare findings across studies. This paper describes the development and first formal psychometric evaluation of the General Help-Seeking Questionnaire (GHSQ), a flexible matrix-style measure in which people rate how likely they would be to seek help from a range of formal and informal sources (friend, parent, mental health professional, help line, no one, and so on) for different types of problems.
The researchers administered the GHSQ to 218 Australian high school students (ages 12 to 19), then re-surveyed them three weeks later to see whether their stated intentions predicted what they actually did. The scale showed satisfactory internal consistency (alphas of .70 to .85) and excellent test-retest reliability (.86 to .92). Critically, intentions predicted actual help-seeking behavior over the following three weeks, with correlations reaching .48 for intimate partners and .42 for non-parent family members—coefficients comparable to those of well-established psychological measures.
The study also revealed meaningful patterns in whom young people turn to. Students strongly preferred informal help from friends and family over professional sources, but their preferences shifted with the problem: for suicidal thoughts, they were less likely to turn to friends and parents and relatively more likely to consider mental health professionals and telephone help lines. The GHSQ has since become a central outcome measure in national and international help-seeking studies, and it offers a practical tool for suicide prevention and mental health promotion programs.
Key findings
- The GHSQ showed satisfactory reliability in 218 high school students: Cronbach's alpha of .85 for the full scale (.83 for suicidal problems, .70 for personal-emotional problems) and three-week test-retest reliability of .86 to .92.
- Help-seeking intentions predicted actual help-seeking behavior over the following three weeks, supporting predictive and construct validity (e.g., r = .48 for intimate partner, r = .42 for non-parent family, r = .17 for mental health professionals).
- Students reported much stronger intentions to seek informal help (friends, partners, parents) than formal help, with friends rated highest of all sources.
- Preferred help sources depended on the problem: for suicidal thoughts, students were less likely to turn to friends, parents, and relatives, but more likely to consider mental health professionals and phone help lines than for other personal problems.
- Convergent validity was supported: students who rated their prior counselling as helpful reported substantially higher intentions to seek professional help again (r = .51 to .57).
- Perceived barriers to counselling were negatively related to intentions to seek professional help for suicidal thoughts (r = -.22), supporting divergent validity.
How to cite
APA
Wilson, C. J., Deane, F. P., Ciarrochi, J. V., & Rickwood, D. (2005). Measuring help-seeking intentions: Properties of the General Help-Seeking Questionnaire. Canadian Journal of Counselling, 39(1), 15–28.
BibTeX
@article{wilson2005measuring,
author = {Wilson, Coralie J. and Deane, Frank P. and Ciarrochi, Joseph V. and Rickwood, Debra},
title = {Measuring help-seeking intentions: Properties of the General Help-Seeking Questionnaire},
journal = {Canadian Journal of Counselling},
year = {2005},
volume = {39},
number = {1},
pages = {15--28}
}
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- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
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Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version.