My PhD (2000 – 2006) work took a critical view of gender, focusing particularly on the suggested links between masculinities and men’s poorer health. The project, supervised by Professors Kate Hunt and Graham Hart, explored how cis men constructed masculinities and examined how notions of ‘manhood’ were linked to men’s health beliefs, practices and health care seeking behaviours. The research explored why male participants rejected recommended health practices in order to demonstrate and achieve masculinities. The research also uncovered examples of ways in which men resisted pressures to behave how they ‘ought’ to. Some described how they had embraced recommended health practices to preserve or restore aspects of masculinity lost through illness or injury.
The qualitative work conducted for my PhD has been used as an exemplar for best practice in data collection and analysis. Judith Green and Nicki Thorogood, in their book ‘Qualitative Methods for Health Research’ used the analytic work published from my thesis, on men’s health beliefs and behaviours, as an example of how to conduct high quality thematic analysis (See Case Study 10.1. Analysis of key themes). They write: ‘The team undertook a thematic analysis of the data, which drew on a number of techniques to develop a nuanced analysis. A first requirement for good analysis is good data, and O’Brien and colleagues were careful to ensure that their focus groups generated rich discussions of issues that are likely to be somewhat taken for granted, and therefore difficult to explicate. They did this by using a mix of natural pre-existing friendship or occupational groups and groups of people with some shared social or illness experiences’. They go on to describe the ‘value of using both inductive analysis (looking for themes in men’s own accounts e.g. ‘competitive drinking’) and rooting the analysis in a theoretical framework (literature on masculinities)‘. Read the paper they are referring to here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09581590902939774
Dr Rosaleen O'Brien 