Marriage and quality of life during COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

COVID-19 pandemic has impacted people around the globe. Countries, including Indonesia, implemented large-scale social restrictions. Since marriage is found to be beneficial to people’s quality of life (QoL), the study aimed to examine the QoL of married people in Indonesia during a large-scale social restriction of the COVID-19 pandemic. An online cross-sectional survey using Qualtrics was conducted in June 2020. Respondents’ sociodemographic data, spouse data (as reported by the respondents), and pandemic-related data were collected, followed by QoL data, measured by WHQOOL-BREF. WHOQL-BREF consists of 26 questions grouped into four domains: physical, psychological, social relationships, and environmental. Mann-Whitney U, Kruskal-Wallis H and Spearman correlation analyses were employed to compare QoL between groups of sociodemographic characteristics. In total, 603 respondents were recruited. The respondents’ mean age is 35.3 years (SD = 7.61), most are females (82%), bachelor degree graduate (95%), Islam (78%), employed (69%), and assigned to work from home during the pandemic (76%). Married men reported better QoL in almost all domains than women; employed respondents reported higher QoL scores than unemployed; higher educated respondents reported higher QoL than those with lower education; respondents with higher income reported higher QoL than those with lower income. We found significant positive correlations between the QoL scores and age, spouse’s age, and marriage length, although they were considered small. Compared to Indonesian population normative scores pre-pandemic, our sample reported no difference in physical and social domains, lower in the psychological domain, but higher in the environmental domain. Indonesian married people, especially women, those with low level of education, currently out of work, and below-average financial condition are the ones who reported worse quality of life during the lockdown. These results can help direct the Indonesian government efforts in dealing with psychosocial problems during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for married couples.