Professional school counseling can be used to solve various psychosocial problems of middle school students who find themselves in conflict experiencing physical · psychological · social changes at the same time. However, despite the school counseli...
Professional school counseling can be used to solve various psychosocial problems of middle school students who find themselves in conflict experiencing physical · psychological · social changes at the same time. However, despite the school counseling is comparatively effective and equipped with proper construction and environmental condition, the rate of students using counseling is low. Therefore, research on the avoidance factors of counseling based on their unique cultural characteristics is required.
Encouraged by this need, this research of methods for encouraging adolescents to use school counseling service focusing on the distinctive psychosocial traits was done. As social beings, adolescents have goals to achieve social competence through social relationships in school, which can be explained with the term social achievement goal. Social achievement goal can be divided into three parts; social mastery which aims to develop social competence, social performance-approach which targets gaining positive recognition from surrounding people, and social performance-avoid which avoids negative feedback of about their social competence from others.
Depending on adolescents' each social achievement tendency, whether they seek counseling or not for the problem differs. Social mastery which have a goal to develop social competence is related to adaptative response pursuit such as seeking counseling while social performance-avoid which have a goal to evade others' judgement about their own lack of social competence avoids adaptative response, seeking negative response. In addition their psychosocial traits affect response, too. Furthermore it varies by methods accounting psychosocial cost according to social achievement goal tendency whether to seek counseling or not.
Social stigma can have important impact in the process from social achievement goal to seeking counseling or not. Regarding counseling, social stigma, which is negative social recognition, is one of the representative variables for predicting attitudes towards counseling. To be specific, social achievement goal affects the degree of one’s social stigma recognition because the standard of social success is decided by tendency of social achievement goal. Briefly, while social mastery, which has internal standard of social success, is less sensitive to social stigma, social performance-approach and -avoid is more sensitive to social stigma, since its standard of social success is external. Therefore, social stigma is chosen as mediator variable in analyzing the effect of social achievement goal on counseling attitudes.
In conclusion, following research problems are set in order to investigate the relationships between social achievement goal, social stigma, and attitudes towards counseling.
Does social stigma have mediator effect in the relationship between social achievement goal and attitude towards counseling?
In order to solve this research problems, survey was conducted at three middle schools located in Seoul and Gyunggi by 476 middle school students. Excluding untrustworthy responses, 439 responses were used for final analysis. The followings are the results of researching the relationships between social achievement goal, social stigma, and attitudes toward counseling.
First, researching mediator effect of social stigma in relationship between social mastery and counseling attitudes, social stigma displayed complete mediated effect on both social proficiency and counseling attitudes negatively. The stronger social mastery tendency which have internal standards, the lower perception of social stigma. So ultimately attitudes toward school counseling become more positive.
Second, by investigating mediator effect of social stigma in relationship between social performance evasion and attitudes toward counseling, it showed complete mediator effect on social performance-avoid negatively and attitudes towards counseling positively each. The stronger social performance-avoid tendency which have external standards, the higher perception of social stigma. So ultimately attitudes toward school counseling become more negative.
The fact that social mastery reduces stigma, thereby resulting in positive counseling attitudes, and social performance-avoid increases social stigma, resulting in negative counseling attitudes implies that adolescents who need help are more likely to avoid it, based on the relatedness of social performance-avoid tendency with various negative psychosocial factors.
Moreover, complete mediation of social stigma on relationship between social achievement goal and attitudes towards counseling suggests the importance of social stigma. Adolescents of social mastery tendency felt counseling helps developing social competence due to low social stigma. Likewise, those of social performance-avoid tendency felt counseling distracts demonstrating social competence because of high social stigma. There are some interventions suggested from these results to solve the problem of social stigma
First, because social achievement goal tendency decides whether one has internal or external standard of success, social achievement goal affects the degree of one’s social stigma recognition. Therefor there are needs to help adolescents' who have social performance-avoid tendency to have more social mastery tendency whichis less sensitive to the fearfullness about the stigma. However, this intervention may be not simple.
In addition, there is a possibility of prevailing social stigma in the whole school for students who have social achievement-avoid tendency because they are most likely problematic. So the interventions which can reduce social stigma and can shape good attitudes toward school counseling for whole school memberships are required.
Finally, research implications such as using social achievement goal to investigate social motive's influence to seeking counseling based on adolescents' cultural characteristics, and identifying the role of social stigma affecting attitudes toward counseling are presented.