Does Marital Satisfaction Matter for Dyadic Associations Between Multimorbidity and Subjective Health Among Korean Married Couples in Middle and Later Life?1

Abstract

The present study aims to investigate how marital satisfaction moderates the dyadic associations between multimorbidity and subjective health. Data were extracted from the Korea Longitudinal Study of Aging in 2016 and 2018. The sample was Korean married couples in middle and later life ( N = 780 couples with low marital satisfaction, N = 1,193 couples with high marital satisfaction). The independent variable was multimorbidity, measured by the number of chronic diseases per person. The dependent variables were subjective life expectancy and self-rated health to represent subjective health. Marital satisfaction was a binary moderator, dividing the sample into low and high marital satisfaction groups. We applied the Actor Partner Interdependency Model to examine actor and partner associations simultaneously and used multigroup analysis to test the moderating effects of marital satisfaction. The results showed that husbands’ multimorbidity was negatively associated with wives’ self-rated health among couples in both the low and high marital satisfaction groups. In couples with high marital satisfaction, wives’ multimorbidity was negatively associated with husbands’ self-rated health, but this was not true for couples with low marital satisfaction. Regarding actor effects, multimorbidity was associated with self-rated health in both marital satisfaction groups. The actor effect of multimorbidity on the subjective life expectancy was significant only among women with low marital satisfaction. These findings suggest that there are universal and gendered associations between multimorbidity and subjective health in couple relationships.