Male role and gender role conflict: Relations to help seeking in men.
Tested theory that adherence to the traditional male gender role and help-seeking attitudes and behaviors are related. Ss were 401 undergraduate men who completed measures of help-seeking attitudes and behaviors, attitudes toward the stereotypic male role, and gender role conflict factors (i.e., success/power/competition, restrictive emotionality, and restrictive affectionate behavior between men). Canonical analysis and regression indicated that traditional attitudes about the male role, concern about expressing emotions, and concern about expressing affection toward other men were each significantly related to negative attitudes toward seeking professional psychological assistance. Restrictive emotionality also significantly predicted decreased past helpseeking behavior and decreased likelihood of future help seeking. The implications of these results for theory, research, and counseling practice are discussed. There appear to be distinct gender differences in psychological help seeking. Two-thirds of all clients seeking psychological help are female. Further, one in three women, compared with one in seven men, seek services from a mental health professional at some point during their lifetime (Collier, 1982). Whereas much research and theoretical writing has focused on the psychological and sociological reasons for women's use of counseling services, a much smaller amount of literature has focused on the problems associated with male reluctance to use psychological services. One possible source of men's hesitance to use counseling services is adherence to the traditional male gender role, although this hypothesis has received very little attention in the help-seeking literature. This lack of attention is somewhat surprising, given that adherence to a role characterized by instrumentality, strength, aggressiveness, and emotional inexpressiveness (David & Brannon, 1976; O'Neti, 1981) seems intuitively antithetical to the behavior of seeking help for psychological concerns. The little research that is available has reported that people with a masculine gender role orientation are less likely to express an interest in seeking counseling than individuals with a feminine gender role'Orientation