THE NEW ZEALAND LIBRARY & INFORMATION MANAGEMENT JOURNAL NGĀ PŪRONGO

NEW ZEALAND LIBRARY & INFORMATION MANAGEMENT JOURNAL • NGĀ PŪRONGO VOL 55, ISSUE NO. 3 • OCTOBER 2015
The top five list completes Sister(s) who ended on the fifth
position.
Table 6 could be used to answer the first part of the second
question ‘Who were the most common kind of people to
whom New Zealand men would offer help and support when
these people were feeling stressed?’ raised in the introduction
section.
Table 6: Rank list of the people to whom participant would
offer help and support by age group
When an age variable is included there are some changes
in the ranks, but Male friends are the first to whom New
Zealand men would offer help and support for the first three
age groups. Older age groups (45-64) would offer help to their
spouse/partner first while the oldest participants would offer
help to their adult children first. Are these differences in rank
lists between age groups statistically significant? As before, to
answer this question a Spearman’s rank-order correlation was
run to determine the relationship between ranks of 12 people to
whom New Zealand men would offer help and support. Results
of calculation are given in the upper triangle of Table 3 (above
the main diagonal).
The following could be inferred from Table 3 (upper triangle):
• All correlations are positive, i.e. there are positive
associations between ranks. In other words, if the
people to whom men would offer help and support are
higher ranked in one age group they will be also higher
ranked in the other age group.
• However, the correlation decreases as the distance
between age groups increases. For instance, the rank list
of the youngest age group (15-24) closely matches the
rank list of the next age group (25-34). The Spearman’s
rank-order correlation is 0.96 and statistically significant
at the 1% level. However, correlation between the rank
list of the youngest age group (15-24) and the oldest
age group (65+) decreases to only 0.17 and is not
statistically significant.
Therefore, we would reject the null hypothesis (H2a) and
conclude that the people to whom New Zealand men would
offer help and support are changing with age. When they are
young they would offer help to different people, than when they
are seniors. However, as explained before in subsection 4.1.1
these changes in the rank lists of people could be for quite
trivial reason such as the availability of parents or a spouse.
4.2.2 Ethnicity
The rank lists in Table 7 are quite similar across three ethnic
groups in spite of some small variations.
Table 7: Rank list of the people to whom participant would
offer help and support by ethnicity.
To assess whether these variations are statistically significant
a Spearman’s rank-order correlation was run to determine the
relationship between ranks on these three ethnic group rank
lists. Results of calculation are given in the upper triangle of
Table 5 (above the main diagonal). All correlations are positive
and highly statistically significant (at the 1% level) which
suggests the three rank lists are quite similar. Therefore, we
cannot reject the null hypothesis (H2b) and can conclude that
the list of people to whom New Zealand men would offer help
and support are quite similar across these three ethnic groups.
4.3 Size of the Men’s Network
To address the question about the most common size of the
men’s network the proportion of participants for each category
who answered the question ‘In general, how many people are
you close to? This means people that you feel at ease with and
can talk to about private matters, or would call on for help and
support if you needed it?’ were calculated. Figure 3 gives the
relative distribution of participants according to the number of
people they are close to. Obviously, the most common size of
the men’s network is 3-5 people, the range selected by 46%
of participants.
Figure 3: Proportion of people participants are close to
4.3.1 Network size and age
Table 8 shows the size of the men’s network across the age
groups. The most common size of the men’s network is 3-5
people across all age groups. However, the percentages of
those who have network size of 1 to 5 people vary between age
groups from 62% (age group 15-24) to 78% (age group 35-44).
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