Running head: ISSUES AND HELP SEEKING BEHAVIOURS
A Critical Analysis of the Adolescents ' Issues
and Help Seeking Behaviors
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A Critical Analysis of the Adolescents '
Issues and Help Seeking Behaviors
According to Fallon and Bowles (1999) the area of adolescent help seeking behaviour is an under-researched area. Since the cognitive and critical thinking of adolescents are still developing, their behaviours toward issues concern them may vary case by case. The purpose of this report was to investigate issues concern adolescents and their help seeking behaviour toward those issues, especially seek professional helps. The report analysis was based on secondary information obtained from various researchers …show more content…
Total 297 of them were in year 7 and 8, 333 were in year 9 and 10, others were in year 11 and 12. Their ages ranged from 11 to 18 years. Each of the participants completed a survey comprised of three parts to define the adolescents ' concerns and help seeking behaviours. The first part contained demographic questions. The second part contained mainly rating and categorizing questions to identify the major problems of concerns, nature of the concerns, and sources of help to the concerns. While the third part focused on the minor concerns. The nature of the both concerns was defined into five categories, family, interpersonal, health, education and others. And the sources of help were in the domain of friends, parents and professionals. The findings show that problems concerns different levels of students were very similar. About 50% of the participants sought help for their major problems, 40% sought for minor problems and 25% would seek help for both problems. The problems associated with family and interpersonal skills were often identified as major issues. For minor issues, family and education problems were frequently …show more content…
The findings also demonstrate that older perpetrators were more likely to seek help than younger ones. Researchers suggested that as the adolescent mature, they may have in-depth cognitive on dating violence and the potential consequences of their behaviour which compelling them to seek help. In conclusion, issues concerns or distress adolescents will vary due to their levels of education, gender, ethicises, age, nationality. And adolescents ' issues usually fall in the domains of family, interpersonal, education, and health. Most of them are not willing to seek help, especially male. But for certain issues, like dating violence, male are more willing to seek help. Easy accessibility made informal sources of help like friends and family common and popular than professional counsellors when adolescents experienced psychological issues. The other reasons cause low frequency of counselling professional help will be like social norms, lack cognition or unaware of benefits from professional help. So the society should promote more benefits of professional counselling and increase the acceptance of it. For adolescents, they are still at growing stage, abilities like