Prevalence of mental distress and of abuse and violence are important indicators of the wellbeing of a community and are significantly differentiated by gender. The socio-economic changes wrought by structural reforms have the potential to disrupt existing notions of gender in ways that could be threatening, demoralising and oppressive for men and women in some contexts and empowering in others. Some of these factors, especially those that concern gender ideology, may indeed be difficult to 'measure'. It is therefore necessary to consider research methodologies that go beyond the quantitative in order to do justice to the complexity of these phenomena.
