Negative and positive life experience among men and women in selected occupations, symptom awareness and visits to the doctor

Abstract

The research reported in this paper had two major aims: firstly, to investigate the distribution of negative and positive life experience among men and women in selected occupations, in an Australian context; secondly, to examine the relationship between quality of life experience and symptom awareness as well as the relationship between both of these and medical help-seeking. Negative life experience was assumed to exist in case of discrepancies between a person's “need-values” (seen as a mixture of cultural values, psychological need-dispositions and “basic human needs”) and their subjectively perceived attainment. Positive life experience was taken to mean high degrees of “need-value” satisfaction. Questionnaires were completed by 799 subjects including male and female highschool teachers, factory and clerical workers, and men in managerial and other higher level positions in industry. Lack of need-value attainment (or the predominance of negative over positive experiences) was lowest among the men in these latter groups. Semiskilled women were in the most disadvantaged position and others occupied the middle range. Teachers ranked second to semiskilled women in terms of negative experience in their work situation, but they were more favorably placed with regard to “life-in-general”. Among both men and women, quality of life experience was significantly related to symptom awareness and to medical help-seeking, though help-seeking was more strongly related to symptom awareness than to life experience scores. Women as a group had high symptom levels more frequently than men with comparable life experience measures, and they sought medical help more often than men when life experience and symptom scores were held constant, an observation which may be attributed to sex role learning. Symptom and help-seeking levels continued to vary in the expected direction when controlling for occupation, though not always significantly. At the same time, some tendencies were group-specific and should be explored further.