Negotiating Discomfort-Comfort: A Grounded Theory of Undergraduate Students' Decision-Making Process for Seeking or Not Seeking Help to Resolve Interpersonal Conflict

Despite the occurrence of student interpersonal conflict in the higher education campus setting, students make only minimal use of campus-based conflict resolution services (CBCRS) as a process for resolving their conflicts (Holton & Warters, 1995; SMS, 2007; Karp & Shum, 2009). Review of the extant literature for the conflict resolution field determined an absence of research regarding students' decision-making processes for seeking help to resolve interpersonal conflict in the higher education setting. This gap carries with it an absence of theory to explain and predict student reluctance to seek conflict resolution assistance.;The purpose of this study was to explore and come to an understanding of undergraduate students' decision-making processes for seeking or not seeking help from a CBCRS for resolving interpersonal conflict. The study utilized the grounded theory approach for qualitative research suggested by Strauss and Corbin (1998). Interview data was collected from undergraduate student volunteers from Nova Southeastern University. Eleven interviews were completed at which point theoretical saturation occurred and no further interviews were necessary.;The data analysis process provided findings and emergent themes that led to the development of the Theory of Negotiating Discomfort-Comfort: Seeking Help to Resolve Interpersonal Conflict. This substantive grounded theory identifies a four-stage decision-making process similarly followed by all participants in the study wherein participants seeking help from the CBCRS did so only when their other seeking-help choices did not result in resolution of the conflict. The theory suggests the decision-making process for students' willingness to seek help consists of an internally negotiated trade-off between variables including the amount of seeking-help discomfort and comfort a conflict party is willing to experience, occurring from perceived conditions and experienced consequences for each stage of the four-stage model, the amount of conflict discomfort currently being experienced, and the amount of conflict resolution comfort ultimately desired.;Study results provide support for theories of reasoned action, attribution and social construction. Study findings provide new theoretical implications of students' motivations and inhibitors for seeking help to resolve conflict and offer new directions for policy, training, and marketing initiatives for supporting and enhancing student conflict resolution in the campus setting.