Gender role conflict, depression, and personality's effect on help seeking behaviors, attitudes, and academic performance

Abstract

<p>Retention of college students is a high priority for universities across the country. To successfully overcome difficulties in college, students need to have effective behavioral skills to deal with ongoing challenges. Effective self-regulation allows students to better control their emotional, cognitive, and behavioral processes. Help seeking is an important self-regulatory behavioral strategy that can be used when faced with either emotional or academic difficulties.yHowever, gender differences have been shown in male and female students' willingness to seek help for psychological issues. In addition, high school performance and standardized test scores which have generally been shown to be strong predictors of retention and academic performance do not fully explain the variance in students' success rate.yThis study examines the help seeking attitudes that male engineering students hold towards both academic and psychological help seeking and how gender role conflict, depression, and two personality traits, neuroticism and extroversion affect these attitudes and impact academic performance.</p>