Affiliation:
1. Hui Liu is assistant professor of sociology at the Michigan State University. Her research examines how social factors are related to health, health behavior, and mortality. Her recent interests focus on historical changes in the relationships between health outcomes and social factors such as marital status and education. She also conducts methodological work on modeling over-dispersed count data.
2. Debra Umberson is professor of sociology and a faculty associate in the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on relationships and health across the life course. Her current research, supported by the National Institute on Aging, considers how different types of relationships influence health behaviors over the life course.
Abstract
Although the meanings and rates of being married, divorced, separated, never-married, and widowed have changed significantly over the past several decades, we know very little about historical trends in the relationship between marital status and health. Our analysis of pooled data from the National Health Interview Survey from 1972 to 2003 shows that the self-rated health of the never-married has improved over the past three decades. Moreover, the gap between the married and the never married has steadily converged over time for men but not for women. In contrast, the self-rated health of the widowed, divorced, and separated worsened over time relative to the married, and the adverse effects of marital dissolution have increased more for women than for men. Our findings highlight the importance of social change in shaping the impact of marital status on self-reported health and challenge long-held assumptions about gender, marital status, and health.
Subject
Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health,Social Psychology
Cited by
311 articles.
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