Developing a Measure of Help Seeking Climate: Links with Belonging, Help-seeking Tendencies, and Campus Climate

• In Event: Toward a Contextually Grounded and Sociocultural Understanding of Academic Help-Seeking: New Directions and Perspectives

Abstract

Objectives/Conceptual Framing
Despite challenging transitions to postsecondary education (Martin, 2009), prior research has not only highlighted a lack of adaptive forms of help-seeking in postsecondary contexts but also primarily focused on students’ attributes and motivations as antecedents of help-seeking (Karabenick & Berger, 2013) rather than contextual affordances (e.g., Seamark & Gabriel, 2016). Extending the work on mastery goal structures and drawing from self-regulated learning (Fong et al., 2023; Zimmerman, 2002), we developed a measure specifically focused on students’ perceptions of help-seeking climate. In addition to assessing scale reliability and construct validity, we examined outcomes such as sense of belonging, help-seeking tendencies, and racial campus climate.

Method
As part of a larger student needs assessment, we surveyed 186 students (86% women) enrolled in a College of Education at a large Hispanic Serving Institution in the southwest U.S. Over half the sample was White (52%), followed by Latinx (32%), Black (11%), Asian (3%), and Other (2%); a tenth of the sample consisted of international students. Just under half were first-generation students (45%), and 26% were part-time students.

We initially developed seven five-point, Likert-style items focused on the messages and environments that may facilitate perceptions of help-seeking benefit. After assessing reliability, we found that one item significantly lowered the reliability and removed this item. We then calculated principal components analysis to assess construct validity. To explore predictive validity, we regressed the help-seeking climate measure on several outcomes (belonging, help-seeking tendencies, and racial campus climate), while controlling for gender, race/ethnicity, enrollment status, international status, and academic level. To assess potential moderator effects, we also tested for interactions between help-seeking climate and two sample characteristics: first-generation status and student of color (SOC).

Findings
Scale reliability was .86, and principal component analyses revealed unidimensionality (see Table 1), explaining 56.1% of the variance. Controlling for various student characteristics, help-seeking climate was as a significant predictor (ps < .001) of all outcome variables of interest (Table 2), with positive associations with social belonging (β = .31), academic belonging (β = .41), instrumental help-seeking (β = .26), and general belonging (β = .33). Conversely, it negatively predicted help-seeking threat (β = -.33), help-seeking avoidance (β = -.34), and racial climate perceptions (stereotyping; β = -.39). When testing interaction effects, we found no evidence of moderation of these associations by first-generation status; in contrast, being a SOC moderated the relationship between help-seeking climate and two outcomes: social belonging (β = .88, p = .04) and help-seeking avoidance (β = -.99, p = .02). Simple slopes analyses revealed that help-seeking climate was more influential for students of color (social belonging: βSOC = .33 vs. βnon-SOC = .16; help-seeking avoidance: βSOC = -.40 vs. βnon-SOC = -.17).

Significance
Shifting the field of help-seeking research from a deficit-framed approach, we explored an important antecedent for adaptive help-seeking, belonging, and racial climate–help-seeking climate. Moreover, help-seeking climate seems more salient for students of color, suggesting the importance of fostering such climates for promoting educational equity in institutions that threaten racially or ethnically minoritized students.

Authors

• Pedram Zarei, Texas State Unniversity

• Carlton J. Fong, Texas State University