The Short-Term and Decade-Long Effects of Divorce on Women's Midlife Health

Author:

Lorenz Frederick O.1,Wickrama K. A. S.2,Conger Rand D.3,Elder Glen H.4

Affiliation:

1. Frederick O. Lorenz is University Professor of Statistics and Sociology at Iowa State University. His research interests are in estimating multi-informant and longitudinal models of relationships and health.

2. K. A. S. Wickrama is Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Iowa State University. His research interests are in work and adolescent and adult physical and emotional health. He is currently conducting research on the effects of the recent tsunami on adolescents and mothers in villages in Sri Lanka.

3. Rand D. Conger is Professor of Human Development at the University of California, Davis, and the founding Director of the Iowa State University Institute for Social and Behavioral Research. He has published widely on stress and adolescent health outcomes, and he recently edited, with Frederick O. Lorenz and K. A. S. Wickrama, Continuity and Change in Family Relations: Theory, Methods, and Empirical Findings.

4. Glen H. Elder, Jr., is Howard W. Odum Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Research Professor of Psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he codirects the Carolina Consortium on Human Development and manages a research program on life course studies. His book with Rand D. Conger, Children of the Land: Adversity and Success in Rural America, was based on the panel of families used in the present article.

Abstract

We hypothesize that divorce immediately increases psychological distress and has long-term negative consequences for the physical health of divorced people. In addition, we hypothesize that divorce indirectly causes long-term increases in distress through stressful midlife events. The hypotheses are tested using data from 416 rural Iowa women who were interviewed repeatedly in the early 1990s when they were mothers of adolescent children; the women were interviewed again in 2001. The data support the hypotheses. In the years immediately after their divorce (1991–1994), divorced women reported significantly higher levels of psychological distress than married women but no differences in physical illness. A decade later (in 2001), the divorced women reported significantly higher levels of illness, even after controlling for age, remarriage, education, income, and prior health. Compared to their married counterparts, divorced women reported higher levels of stressful life events between 1994 and 2000, which led to higher levels of depressive symptoms in 2001.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Subject

Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health,Social Psychology

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