2.3.5. Confidence in and Quality of Actual Helping Behaviours
NSSI, non-suicidal self-injury
In the pre-course and six-month follow-up surveys, participants were asked: “In the past 6 months, have you had contact with someone who you thought might be engaging in non-suicidal self-injury?” Those who answered “Yes” were asked how many people they assisted. They were then asked to provide the age range, gender, and type of relationship (e.g., family member or work colleague) of the person they had the most contact with.Participants were asked to select which, if any, of 20 possible actions they took to support the person they knew. These actions were the same as those assessing intended helping actions, plus two additional items (“I did not do anything” and “I did something else”). Participants who selected “I did something else” were asked to specify what they did in a free-text box. They were then asked how confident they were in their ability to help the person on a 5-point Likert scale from “Not at all confident” (a score of 1) to “Extremely confident” (a score of 5).Participants who reported helping a person engaging in NSSI were asked two open-ended questions with free-text response options: “What were the effects on the person of what you did?” and “What did the person do as a result of your help?” Participants who reported that they did not offer help were asked “Are there any particular reasons that you did not try to help?” and were prompted to specify these reasons in a free-text box.As with intended helping behaviour, separate scales were created for recommended and non-recommended actual helping behaviours. Concordance was calculated by summing the number of selected actions that were consistent with the guidelines and course curriculum separately for recommended and non-recommended actions. A cut-off score for mastery was set at 80% of concordant actions for both scales. This translates to a score of 7 or more of the 8 recommended actions and 8 or more of the 10 non-recommended actions. The agreement coefficient, determined from the subset of participants that responded to these items, was 0.82 for recommended actions (n = 85) and 0.83 for non-recommended actions (n = 84) [