The Moderating Role of Help Seeking Experience and Self-Construals on the Relationship Between Schema Coping Styles and Attitudes Towards Seeking Psychological Help

This study investigated the moderating role of help-seeking experiences and self-construals in the relationship between schema coping styles and attitudes toward seeking psychological help among university students. The study was conducted among 773 students enrolled in formal undergraduate programs at a public university in Turkey during the 2017-2018 academic year. The data were collected using the demographic information form, the Attitudes Towards Seeking Psychological Help Scale-R, the Autonomous-Relational Self Scale, and a Turkish-adapted Schema Coping Questionnaire. The data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics 24.0 and the PROCESS macro version 3.3 by Hayes. Descriptive statistics, Pearson product-moment correlation, and bootstrap methods for moderation analyzes were used. Results indicated that schema coping styles, self-construals, help-seeking experiences, and the perceived quality of these experiences significantly predicted attitudes toward seeking psychological help. In addition, autonomous and autonomous-relational self-construals, the presence of previous help-seeking experiences, and the perceived quality of these experiences were found to have varying moderating effects on the relationship between schema coping styles and attitudes towards psychological help-seeking.