Date of Award

8-2016

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Educational Studies

First Advisor

Ayse Ciftci

Committee Chair

Ayse Ciftci

Committee Member 1

Blake A. Allan

Committee Member 2

Eric D. Deemer

Committee Member 3

Susan L. Prieto-Welch

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to understand East Asian international student’s underutilization of counseling services (versus U.S. domestic students) by applying Theory of Reasoned Action/Planned Behavior (TRA/PB) and Ludwikowski, Vogel, and Armstrong (2009)’s stigma model to help-seeking. Participants were 146 East Asian international students and 210 domestic college students at Purdue University. AMOS 23.0 for Structural Equation Modeling was used to conduct a Latent Mean Analysis (LMA) and a multigroup analysis. The multigroup analysis results found that help-seeking intention was explained by the same hypothesized model in both groups, which was based on the TRA/PB (Ajzen, 2012) and the stigma model (Ludwikowski et al., 2009). However, no significant group differences were found for most of the hypothesized paths, except a path from personal stigma to self-stigma. The LMA results revealed that East Asian international students reported significantly higher help-seeking intention and lower self-stigma and perceived behavior control. Historically, Asian students are known to have more stigma and negative attitudes (Sue & Sue, 2008), so this finding draws our attention to the further cross-cultural studies about the reason for this discrepancy. Implications for theory, research, and practice are addressed.

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