Grounded Theory on Helping Behavior and Its Shaping Factors
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Abstract
In social psychology, the attribution model of helping behavior suggests that beliefs of the helping target’s responsibility for the need for help evoke affective motivators such as feelings of pity, sympathy, or anger. The affective motivation leads to helping or not helping the target. The current emergent theory is an enhancement of this theory by incorporating other personal and situational variables.
Through the use of classic grounded theory, I interviewed 80 participants from different De La Salle Schools in the Philippines. This yielded over 1300 individual incidents that were compared and contrasted to form codes, categories and subcategories. A theory on the decision making process of helping emerged that incorporates the helper’s personal conviction, and rational deliberations of the situation. The desire to help is based on the helper’s rational-emotive beliefs (philosophical ideals and values that nurture helping and the knowledge of the nature of risk/problem) and relational-emotive ties (with the one who needs help and with a social group that
nurtures helping). The desire to help undergoes a process of rational-pragmatic deliberations on the appropriateness of the recipients need of help, the cost of helping, the helper’s capability of helping, and the logistics of helping before the actual helping occurs. The theory has implications for current social psychological theories of helping, and the use of classic grounded theory research.
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