The Rowett Institute of Health and Nutrition, University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK.
BMC Public Health. 2013 May 1;13:425. doi: 10.1186/1471-2458-13-425.
Men continue to have a lower life expectancy in most countries compared to women. Explanations of this gendered health inequality tend to focus on male risk taking, unhealthy lifestyle choices and resistance to seeking help from health services. In the period 2005-2008 the Scottish Government funded a nationwide community health promotion programme aimed at improving men's health, called Well Men Service Pilots (henceforth WMS).
This paper explores WMS programme users' perspectives and experiences of health help-seeking against theories of hegemonic masculinity as explanatory frameworks for men's behaviour around health and illness, and their views on a male-specific focus of the programme. It is based on a secondary analysis of 43 semi-structured interviews with men who engaged with this programme.
We challenge the commonly held notion of men as being disinterested in their health, and point to their heterogeneity in relation to their views about health and notions of health seeking. Moreover, men in our study were largely ambivalent about the need for gender specific services, despite their positive reactions to the programme in general.
Our findings question the utility of some theories of masculinity that posit somewhat simplistic explanations for men's reluctance to seek help from formal healthcare services. They also suggest that providing male-specific health services may not significantly address men's supposed reluctance to seek help from formal health services. Essentially, age seemed to be more important than gender. All encompassing health programmes are likely to fail to meet their health improvement objectives if they attempt to engage with men on the simple basis that they are male.
在大多数国家，男性的预期寿命继续低于女性。对于这种性别健康不平等的解释往往集中在男性冒险、不健康的生活方式选择以及对寻求医疗服务的抵制上。在 2005 年至 2008 年期间，苏格兰政府资助了一项名为“健康男士服务试点”（简称 WMS）的全国性社区健康促进计划，旨在改善男性健康。
本文探讨了 WMS 项目使用者在健康求助方面的观点和经验，这些观点和经验与霸权男性气质理论作为解释框架相对应，该理论解释了男性在健康和疾病方面的行为，以及他们对该项目男性特定重点的看法。它基于对 43 名参与该项目的男性进行的 43 次半结构化访谈的二次分析。
我们挑战了男性对健康不感兴趣的普遍观念，并指出他们在健康观念和健康寻求观念方面存在异质性。此外，我们研究中的男性对特定于男性的服务的需求大多持矛盾态度，尽管他们对该计划总体上持积极反应。
我们的研究结果质疑了一些男性气质理论的有效性，这些理论对男性不愿从正规医疗保健服务中寻求帮助提出了一些过于简单的解释。它们还表明，提供特定于男性的健康服务可能不会显著解决男性据称不愿从正规健康服务中寻求帮助的问题。本质上，年龄似乎比性别更重要。如果全面的健康计划试图仅仅基于男性身份与男性接触，那么它们很可能无法实现改善健康的目标。
