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In men's health research, an important gap exists in how we explain differences in health among men. Though scholarly contributions to men's health disparities are growing, there continues to be a lack of discourse around concrete solutions that can be applied to reducing or eliminating differences in health outcomes between groups of men. This is the first special issue dedicated to describing strategies for addressing men's health disparities globally and across racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. Collectively, these papers represent a range of efforts to not simply explain men's health disparities, but to describe interventions or findings in such a way that they inform strategies to reduce or eliminate men's health disparities. This body of work uses a variety of research methods, captures global, social and economic developmental issues, and provides practical solutions that can be implemented by various stakeholders at various levels.
Keywords: disparities, gender, men's health, policy, practice, research
Men's health has become a worldwide concern and is now a topic of discussion in many health care, research, and policy circles. This increasing interest in men's health is, in part, due to the various sources that have documented the ways in which women fare better than men across a number of health outcomes (Courtenay, 2011; European Commission, 2011; White, 2011). While the release of the report by the European Commission on the state of men's health in the European Union focused unprecedented global attention on men's health, the report has been criticized for not attending to disparities among men (Treadwell & Young, 2012). Men's health research has primarily focuses on the extent to which social and cultural factors shape men's health practices and health outcomes (Lee & Owens, 2002), but an important gap that exists in the literature is how we explain differences in health among men (Griffith, Gunter, & Watkins, 2012; Griffith, Metzl, & Gunter, 2011; Springer, Mager Stellman, & Jordan-Young, 2012; Treadwell & Braithwaite, 2005).
While the men's health movement has helped identify disparities that exist between men and women, men's health disparities research considers how the health of men is determined by cultural, environmental, and economic factors associated with race, ethnicity and other socially-defined identities and group memberships (Griffith et al., 2011). In literature on men's health,...