Deprivation, Masculinities and Sexual Health

PI: Dr Karen Lorimer
CIs: Prof Kate Hunt, Prof Lesley McMillan, Prof Lisa McDaid, Dona Milne, Rosie Ilett
Funder: Chief Scientist Office (CZH/4/925)

This ambitious qualitative study, funded by the CSO, recruited 116 men and women aged 18-40 years, from areas of high socio-economic deprivation across Scotland, to 18 focus groups and 35 individual interviews. The project explored an array of sexual health understandings and behaviours via a masculinities framework, to explore how we might better develop interventions to tackle poor sexual health outcomes. We embraced the WHO holistic definition of sexual health, which goes beyond ‘bugs and babies’ to include freedom from coercion and violence.  So, in this project we explored with men and women their understandings of various forms of gender-based violence.

here is the summary on the CSO website

Lorimer, K., L. McMillan, L. McDaid, D. Milne, S. Russell and K. Hunt (2018). “Exploring masculinities, sexual health and wellbeing across areas of high deprivation in Scotland: the depth of the challenge to improve understandings and practices.” Health and Place, Vol50. Open access: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1353829217300795

McDaid, L., K. Hunt, L. McMillan, S. Russell, D. Milne, R. Ilett and K. Lorimer (2019). “Absence of holistic sexual health understandings among men and women in deprived areas of Scotland: qualitative study.” BMC Public Health 19(1): 299. https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-019-6558-y