Background: The provision of healthcare for asylum seekers is a global issue. Providing appropriate and culturally sensitive services requires us to understand the barriers facing asylum seekers and the facilitators that help them access health care. Here, we report on two linked studies exploring these issues, along with the health care needs and beliefs of asylum seekers living in the UK.

The UK has substantial minority populations of shortterm and long-term migrants from countries with various types of healthcare systems. AimThis study explored how migrants' previous knowledge and experience of health care influences their current expectations of health care in a system relying on clinical generalists performing a gatekeeping role.

A multidimensional theory of similarity in which the mental representations of stimulus objects are assumed to be drawn from multivariate normal distributions is described. A distance-based similarity function is defined and the expected value of similarity is derived. This theory is the basis for a possible explanation of paradoxical results with highly similar stimuli regarding the form of the similarity function and the distance metric. A stochastic approach to multidimensional scaling based on samedifferent judgments is demonstrated using artificial and real data sets. The theory of similarity presented is used as a basis for a Thurstonian extension of Shepard's model of identification performance. 8 1988 Academic Press. Inc.We thank M. Waugh and E. Gee for providing computer and noncomputer resources, respectively.

Over the last ten years we have witnessed a great increase in writing on the nature of masculinity and the development of the concept of multiple masculinities, but much of this material has been speculative and highly theoretical. The related work linking masculinities to alcohol has often had a psychometric slant. The current paper aims to show the wider relevance of new theoretical ideas on masculinities to alcohol consumption among young men. Specifically: to describe the social context of drinking and drunkenness among a sample of young men living in Greater Glasgow, and to analyse the masculine role component of such contemporary drinking cultures. A qualitative methodology was used. Ten focus groups and twelve in-depth 'life-trajectory' interviews were completed. Respondents were aged between 16 and 24 years. We discovered that the social context of male drinking is changing very rapidly and masculinities are being redefined. While there remains some evidence of traditional masculine drinking norms and alcohol use, the increasing diversity of drinking locations and alcohol products are instrumental in achieving new expressions of male identity among young men.