Adolescents with emotional, interpersonal and even academic problems can benefit from
using social services. However, these adolescents are unlikely to seek help from
social services, thus creating issues in service underutilization. Supposedly, these
adolescents may not find social services to be useful or socially desirable. How
these perceptions impede adolescents’ help-seeking intention is the focus
of the present study, which collected data from 1065 junior high school students in
Hong Kong, China. Results support the hypotheses that the perceived usefulness of
social services and perceived societal disdain for seeking help from the services
affected students’ likelihood of help seeking in the presence of problems.
These findings generally hold for students who seek help to deal with academic,
emotional and interpersonal problems. Promoting the image of social services is
therefore necessary to encourage adolescents with problems to seek help from the services.
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