Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science (MS)
Department
Psychology
First Advisor
Lindsay Holly
Abstract
Parents often act as gatekeepers to their children and adolescents receiving mental health services. Youth help-seeking models propose that three parent-focused factors (perceptions of their youth’s illness profile, predisposing characteristics, and enabling resources) impact each stage of the help-seeking process: problem recognition (i.e., perceived needers), decision to seek help (i.e., treatment intenders), and service selection and utilization (i.e., treatment utilizers). Research is needed that examines how the above factors relate to parents getting “stuck” in the help-seeking process (i.e., do not become treatment utilizers). The current study investigated whether predisposing characteristics (i.e., family and demographic characteristics, mental health attitudes and beliefs) predict parents’ location in the help-seeking pathway. Parents (N=186; 25.8% Black or African American, 25.3% Hispanic or Latino, 15.6% Asian) were recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and completed online self-report questionnaires. Results demonstrated that White parents are more likely than both Black/African American and Asian parents to be perceived needers when compared to treatment intenders or treatment utilizers. Additionally, parents are more likely to be treatment utilizers than perceived needers as parental self-efficacy increases and perceived irrelevance of treatment decreases. Results suggest a need to both empower parents to seek youth mental health services and to address structural inequities in order to bridge the need-to-access-gap for youth mental health care.