Doing masculinity, not doing health? a qualitative study among dutch male employees about health beliefs and workplace physical activity
TL;DR: In order to establish a greater reach among vulnerable employees such as ageing men, worksite health promotion programs including workplace physical activity may benefit from greater insight in the tensions between health behaviours and masculinity.
read more
Abstract: Being female is a strong predictor of health promoting behaviours. Workplaces show great potential for lifestyle interventions, but such interventions do not necessarily take the gendered background of lifestyle behaviours into account. A perspective analyzing how masculine gender norms affect health promoting behaviours is important. This study aims to explore men's health beliefs and attitudes towards health promotion; in particular, it explores workplace physical activity in relation to masculine ideals among male employees. In the Fall of 2008, we interviewed 13 white Dutch male employees aged 23-56 years. The men worked in a wide range of professions and occupational sectors and all interviewees had been offered a workplace physical activity program. Interviews lasted approximately one to one-and-a-half hour and addressed beliefs about health and lifestyle behaviours including workplace physical activity, as well as normative beliefs about masculinity. Thematic analysis was used to analyze the data. Two normative themes were found: first, the ideal man is equated with being a winner and real men are prepared to compete, and second, real men are not whiners and ideally, not vulnerable. Workplace physical activity is associated with a particular type of masculinity - young, occupied with looks, and interested in muscle building. Masculine norms are related to challenging health while taking care of health is feminine and, hence, something to avoid. Workplace physical activity is not framed as a health measure, and not mentioned as of importance to the work role. Competitiveness and nonchalant attitudes towards health shape masculine ideals. In regards to workplace physical activity, some men resist what they perceive to be an emphasis on muscled looks, whereas for others it contributes to looking self-confident. In order to establish a greater reach among vulnerable employees such as ageing men, worksite health promotion programs including workplace physical activity may benefit from greater insight in the tensions between health behaviours and masculinity.
read more
Chat with Paper
AI Agents for this Paper
Find similar papers on Google Scholar, PubMed and Arxiv
Write a critical review of this paper
Analyze citations of this paper to find unaddressed research gaps
Citations
Gender and evolutionary theory in workplace health promotion
Erika Björklund,Jan Wright +1 more
TL;DR: It is demonstrated how such a trend has the potential to embed essentialist and limiting stereotypes of women and men in health promotion practice and the implications of such ideas about health and gender for interventions aimed at changing behaviour and lifestyles are discussed.
„Mir geht es gut!“. Gesundheitsvorstellungen von Männern in der Schweiz. Ergebnisse aus einem empirischen Projekt
Nina Wehner,Diana Baumgarten,Frank Luck,Andrea Maihofer,Elisabeth Zemp +4 more
- 11 Sep 2015
TL;DR: Wehner et al. as discussed by the authors present the results of qualitative interviews with forty Swiss men aged between thirty and sixty on their subjective perceptions of health and health actions, using selected thematic approaches, on performance, the significance of physical fitness, dealing with feelings and pain, and the connection between conceptions of health, old and new constructions of masculinity.
Gender differences in diet quality and the association between diet quality and BMI: an analysis in young Australian adults who completed the Healthy Eating Quiz.
Sasha Fenton,Lee M Ashton,Daniel C W Lee,Clare E. Collins +3 more
- 25 Apr 2024
TL;DR: Interventions that target young adults are needed to improve diet quality and its potential contribution to BMI status, with lower diet quality more strongly associated with higher BMI in females compared to males.
3
The Connections Between Work, Prostate Cancer Screening, Diagnosis, and the Decision to Undergo Radical Prostatectomy.
TL;DR: Clinicians and patients should explicitly explore and discuss how surgery side effects may affect work and career plans during treatment decision-making, according to the findings of this qualitative study.
3
References
Using thematic analysis in psychology
Virginia Braun,Victoria Clarke +1 more
TL;DR: Thematic analysis is a poorly demarcated, rarely acknowledged, yet widely used qualitative analytic method within psychology as mentioned in this paper, and it offers an accessible and theoretically flexible approach to analysing qualitative data.
145.8K
Hegemonic Masculinity Rethinking the Concept
TL;DR: The concept of hegemonic masculinity has influenced gender studies across many academic fields but has also attracted serious criticism as mentioned in this paper, and the authors trace the origin of the concept in a convergence of ideas and map the ways it was applied when research on men and masculinities expanded.
Constructions of masculinity and their influence on men's well-being: a theory of gender and health.
TL;DR: How factors such as ethnicity, economic status, educational level, sexual orientation and social context influence the kind of masculinity that men construct and contribute to differential health risks among men in the United States is explored.
4.1K
The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory: Differentiating hostile and benevolent sexism.
Peter Glick,Susan T. Fiske +1 more
TL;DR: A theory of sexism formulated as ambivalence toward women and validated by a corresponding measure, the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI), is presented in this paper, which taps two positively correlated components of sexism that nevertheless represent opposite evaluative orientations toward women: sexist antipathy or Hostile Sexism and a subjectively positive (for sexist men ) orientation toward women, Benevolent Sexism (BS).
3.9K
“Doing Gender”: A Critical Review and an Exploration of Lesbigay Domestic Arrangements
TL;DR: In this article, the authors conducted an empirical study of the division of housework in lesbigay households in Sweden and found a strong pattern of egalitarianism that consists less in a 50% split between the couple in all household tasks but in the fluidity, complexity, and deliberateness in which housework is shared, especially among lesbian couples.
1.9K