Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

"It's Sort Of Like Being A Detective": Understanding How Australian Men Self-Monitor Their Health Prior To Seeking Help, James A. Smith, Annette J. Braunack-Mayer, Gary Wittert, Megan Warin

Faculty of Social Sciences - Papers (Archive)

Background It 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. Methods In 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 & Discussion We 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 …