An Exploration of the Factors that Prevent Students from Seekinghelp from Teachers : Focusing on the Students’ Experience of Loss

The purpose of this study is to collect retrospective data from university students in order to develop a teachers’ training program to encourage students’ help-seeking behavior and to improve teachers’ responsiveness toward students’ concerns. 283 college students completed a questionnaire asking to rate the difficulty they felt when consulting their teachers on certain issues and to write freely why they felt so. The results indicated that the experience of loss was rated high among the issues as something that should not to be consulted with teachers. Regarding the reasons for the difficulty, 516 excerpts were obtained from the free description and were classified using the KJ method into 6 categories: "reserved," "sense of worry," "sense of trust," "sense of resistance," “skill and opportunity," and "attitude toward help-seeking,". Implications of how these results can be applied to promote students’ help-seeking behavior were discussed