The Development, Validity, and Reliability of the Barriers to Seeking Psychological Help Scale for College Students
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this study was to develop a scale to determine the barriers affecting undergraduate students seeking psychological help. In line with this purpose, the validity and reliability of the scale were examined in five different samples. Exploratory factor analysis results suggested that the scale consists of five dimensions, labeled as fear of being stigmatized by society, trust in the mental health professional, difficulties in self-disclosure, perceived devaluation and lack of knowledge in the first sample. The confirmatory factor analysis cross-validated the scale’s five-factor structure on a new college students’ sample. The convergent and divergent validity of the scale were also supported with theoretically and empirically expected correlation with self-concealment, self-stigma, and attitudes towards seeking psychological help. Moreover, the scale was found to have an adequate stability coefficient across three weeks and appropriate levels of internal consistency coefficient reliability for each of the subscales in two different samples. These initial findings show that theBarriers to Seeking Psychological Help Scale is a valid and reliable instrument to measure hindrances related to psychological help-seeking for undergraduate students. Future studies can examine the validity and reliability of the scale on different samples and cultures, as well as predictive validity on college students’ decisions to seekcounseling.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".