Gender Differences to the Contextual Factors Questionnaire and Implications for General Practice

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to contribute to the revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) by exploring how mental health service users and their relatives conceive the influence of the contextual factors, as described in Chap. 21 of the ICD-10, on a) the onset of a mental or behavioral disorder; b) the resurgence of such a disorder; and c) the recovery process. In individual interviews, the 18 main categories of contextual factors proposed by the ICD-11 (beta draft) were discussed through the Contextual Factors Questionnaire (CFQ) by 28 participants who completed the CFQ individually. This paper presents the results from a t-test that was performed on the data set to assess whether the means for two groups who completed the CFQ were statistically different from each other (p≤ 0.05). On one hand, we found significant differences between users and family members for A) Housing or the environment (p=0.01), and B) Personal finances (p=0.04); and for C) Water or nutrition (p=0.05) between male and female participants, on the other hand. In light of the fact that Social or cultural environments were considered to be the most influential of all 18 contextual factors by all aggregated participants, this suggests that male-female differences are related to social norms concerning gender, rather than discrete biological sex categories.