Abstract
BackgroundIt is commonly held that men delay help seeking because they are ignorant about and disinterested in their health. However, this discussion has not been informed by men's lay perspectives, which have remained almost entirely absent from scholarship relating to men's help seeking practices.MethodsIn this qualitative paper, we draw on semi-structured interviews with 36 South Australian men to examine their understandings of help seeking and health service use.Results & DiscussionWe use participants' talk about self-monitoring to challenge the assumption that men are disinterested in their health, arguing instead that the men in our study monitored their health status and made conscious decisions about when and how to seek help. Using an inductive approach during the thematic analysis we were able to identify four key factors that influenced how men monitored their health and explain how these intersect with the way men sought help and used health services.ConclusionWe show that the men in our study were actively engaged in the self-monitoring of their health. We suggest that these findings offer an alternative approach for understanding how we can promote men's interaction with health services.
Highlights
It is commonly held that men delay help seeking because they are ignorant about and disinterested in their health
Our findings suggest that self-monitoring is a health practice informed by the health information men gather when responding to health problems
Drawing on men's lay perspectives of their help seeking practices, we have described how 36 men residing in North-Western Adelaide region of South Australia selfmonitored their health prior to seeking professional help
Summary
It is commonly held that men delay help seeking because they are ignorant about and disinterested in their health. Some commentary has suggested that men are victims of their own behaviour [5,6,7,8,9] This has been used to argue that men are ignorant about or disinterested in their health [10,11,12]. Building upon recent literature which has challenged this victim-blaming mentality [4,16,17,18,19,20,21,22], this paper draws on qualitative research to argue that men are actively engaged in monitoring their health prior to seeking help.
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