Engendering Men 4 Health: How do we consider ethnicity and gender in African American men's health interventions?

While there is consensus that health promotion programs should be culturally sensitive, it is less clear how interventions can be more gender sensitive. Gender influences health and intersects with other known determinants of health to play an important role in health behavior; male gender, however, remains a critical but understudied factor that impacts men's health practices and interventions. In this presentation, we describe the process we used to develop Men 4 Health: an intervention designed to improve African American men's healthy eating and physical activity by considering and addressing gendered, ethnic and environmental factors. We combined intersectional and community-based participatory research (CBPR) approaches with exploratory focus group data collection to tailor this intervention to the lives of urban, African American men in southeast Michigan. In addition to considering behavior-specific motivation and other psychological factors, Men 4 Health was designed to help men determine how to eat healthier and engage in more physical activity in the context of their social and built environment. The involvement and input from our community partners and members of our population of interest were essential in helping us understand how men's social roles, ethnic and gender identities, and daily activities influenced contextual and environmental factors that shaped African American men's daily lives and health behaviors. These factors helped us develop different yet complementary strategies to improve healthy eating and physical activity. Specifically, the CBPR approach provided insight into how central gender was to African American men's health priorities, social relationships, social roles and health behavior.