The Theory of Planned Behaviour Approach to Identifying Predictors of Intentions to Seek Help for Mental Health Issues Among Post-Secondary Students Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mental health challenges among Canadian post-secondary students have been on a steep upward trend in recent years, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, many students do not reach out to the mental health services available to them. To lessen or remove actual and perceived barriers, research has been exploring how to predict their intentions to seek help for their personal mental health challenges. Much of this work applies the widely used Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1980) which posits that behavioural intentions are best predicted by attitudes toward the behaviour; perceived normative expectations; and perceived behavioural control. Though the theory also posits that beliefs underlie and are formative of these three predictors, studies have largely neglected their measurement. This is problematic as it deviates from the TPB and frustrates efforts toward the development of interventions to enhance behaviours towards seeking help for mental health challenges. If they are to be effective, such interventions must be directed at changing salient beliefs. This research addresses this gap through a mixed-method sequential design. It provides a unique and valuable contribution to scholarship and practice by identifying and examining the role of students’ attitudinal, normative, and control beliefs with respect to their intentions to seek help. This is examined separately and together with the more traditionally studied direct predictors of attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioural control (i.e., the formative constructs defined by the beliefs). Students relied on six salient beliefs concerning their intentions to seek mental health help: two behavioural, two normative, and two control beliefs. Student attitudes, subjective norms, and PBC mediated the links between salient beliefs and intentions, with PBC being the strongest predictor of intentions to help-seek. The findings help inform interventions to change the beliefs most associated with low intentions to get mental health support.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it