Psychological Help Seeking Behavior Among Hispanics - A Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help

The rapid growth of the Hispanic population in the United States and indications of underutilization of menal health care services by this ethnic minority, underscores the need for a reliable instrument to assess the attitudes toward seeking psychotherapy among Hispanics. Fisher and Turner developed in 1970 the Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help Scale (ATP) which has become one of the most widely used instruments to measure attitudes toward psychotherapy. However, the ATP was developed and standardized using mainly Caucasian participants. The principal aim of this work was to explore the usefulness of the ATP for Hispanic populations. A factorial analysis of the ATP using answers from 266 Hispanic respondents obtained a factor solution that partially followed the theoretical framework of Fisher and Turner; however, the results also suggested the ATP could be improved to measure attitudes toward psychotherapy more accurately among Hispanics. A second aim of this work was to analyze the effect of income, acculturation, prior exposure to psychotherapy, and gender as predictors of attitudes toward seeking psychological help.