Measuring the willingness to seek help

This paper describes the creation and validation of an instrument designed to measure an individual’s willingness to seek help. The instrument, a questionnaire with twenty-five statements in Likert format, is based on the theoretical perspective of Alan Keith-Lucas, who perceived the willingness of a person to seek help as contingent on three conditions: recognition of the need for outside assistance, readiness for self-disclosure, and willingness to relinquish some degree of control to a helper. Tests of discriminant and divergent validity as well as inter-item reliability generated promising results for this new research tool. The full questionnaire is presented in an appendix.