Mental Help Seeking Attitudes Scale (MHSAS): Development, reliability, validity, and comparison with the ATSPPH-SF and IASMHS-PO.

Abstract

Attitudes is a key help-seeking construct that influences treatment seeking behavior via intention to seek help, per the theory of planned behavior (TPB). This article presents the development and psychometric evaluation of the Mental Help Seeking Attitudes Scale (MHSAS), designed to measure respondents' overall evaluation (unfavorable vs. favorable) of their seeking help from a mental health professional. In Study 1 (N = 857 United States adults), exploratory factor analysis (EFA), confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), and item response theory (IRT) analysis were used to identify an optimal set of 9 items that demonstrated initial evidence of internal consistency, unidimensionality, and strong measurement equivalence/invariance (ME/I) across gender, past help-seeking experience, and psychological distress. Initial convergent evidence of validity was demonstrated via theoretically anticipated relationships between the MHSAS and key variables in the help-seeking nomological network (e.g., subjective norms, perceived behavioral control, intention, public stigma, self-stigma, anticipated risks and benefits, gender, previous help seeking). Initial incremental evidence of validity was demonstrated when the MHSAS demonstrated the ability to account for unique variance in help-seeking intention, beyond that accounted for by the Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help-Short Form scale (ATSPPH-SF) and the Psychological Openness subscale of the Inventory of Attitudes Toward Seeking Mental Health Services (IASMHS-PO). Study 2 (N = 207 United States adults at Times 1 and 2) provided initial evidence of test-retest reliability over a 3-week period. The MHSAS offers mental health professionals a new tool for measuring attitudes that may avoid limitations of current help seeking-attitudes measures (e.g., construct-irrelevant variance). (PsycINFO Database Record

Validation of the Malay Mental Help Seeking Attitude Scale

“…To our best knowledge, the current study was one of the first studies to validate the MHSAS in a different culture and region. The results supported a single factor solution for the Malay MHSAS and the scale's unidimensionality was consistent with the findings of its developers, Hammer et al (16). The present study also provided support for the scale's concurrent validity, and demonstrated high internal consistency of α=.892 [26], a value that is close to the original scale's internal consistency value (α=.92).…”

Physician referral to a psychologist: Testing alternative behavioral healthcare seeking models

“…Participants responded using a seven‐point semantic differential scale anchored by bipolar adjectives at either end (e.g., bad vs. good ), with higher scores indicating more positive attitudes. Help‐seeking attitudes instruments that follow Azjen's () recommendations have previously demonstrated evidence of reliability (α ≥ 0.81; Hammer, Parent, & Spiker, ) and validity (e.g., significant positive association between attitudes and intention to seek help; Schomerus et al, ). Internal consistency was 0.87 (95% CI of 0.852, 0.884) in the present study.…”

Associations Among Social Connections, Body Dissatisfaction, and Disordered Eating in African American and European American College Women

“…The MHSAS is a 9item instrument that examines attitudes toward seeking help from a mental health professional if respondents hypothetically had a mental health concern (Hammer, Parent, & Spiker, 2018). Participants were asked to respond to a single statement on a 7point Likerttype scale.…”