Two ways to obtain an object property

This relates to a minor dilemma I come across from time and time, and I'm looking for advice on pros and cons and best practice. Last night I encountered it again. Within a site I have a User object, and within page code would like to have if ($crntUser->isASubscriber) {...} There seems to be two ways to handle this: I can have a User object method "getSubscriberStatus()" which sets $this->isASubscriber. But to use this I would have to run the method just before the if statement. Or I could have a method "isASubscriber()" which returns the result, meaning the if statement should be if ($crntUser->isASubscriber()) {...} While this is last night's specific example, I seem to face the method-setting-variable or the method-returning-result-directly decision quite often. Is either of these approaches preferable, or does it simply not matter? Thanks Roddie Grant