�For years, researchers have known that adults wHO have swapped rings say they are healthier than their never-married peers ar. According to a recent study, though, singles ar catching up when it comes to good health.
"Married people are better off than unmarried masses in footing of wellness status, only the opening has narrowed over time," said trail author Hui Liu, an assistant professor and sociologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing.
The authors exploited 32 geezerhood of data from the National Health Interview Survey to analyze trends in marital status and wellness among around 1.1 million participants: married, widowed, divorced, disjointed and never-married adults ages 25 to 80.
The study appears in the September issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.
Liu and her joint author found that over the past 3 decades, self-reports of boilersuit health among never-married adults improved significantly, making the discrepancy in health between married and never matrimonial less pronounced.
This narrowing health gap between the married and the never married applies only to men, but not women, Liu aforementioned.
One reason for this trend is that today's society power offer never-married men "greater access to social resources and support" that were in the past principally found in a married person, the authors noted.
However, Susan Averett, Ph.D., professor of economics and business at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., said that the "information cannot tell us definitively if marriage is the cause of the change in self-reported health or some former unobserved factor" is at work.
"Given the rise in cohabitation over the time period they survey and the lack of evidence on how cohabiting affects wellness relative to marriage - since cohabiting is generally less stable and shorter term - means that we miss an interesting piece of the puzzle," said Averett, who had no affiliation with the study.
Over time, self-reports of wellness also improved for African-Americans, Liu aforementioned. Except for the widowed, all groups reported showed improvements in self-rated health, a reflexion of advances in health among African-Americans in the United States in general, she aforementioned.
In direct contrast, the study also pointed to an emerging trend toward worsening health in those wHO had antecedently been marital in comparability to their married peers, especially widows or widowers, who experienced the to the highest degree significant declines.
In 1972, the widowed were around as likely to report being in good health as the married, simply in 2003, they were 7 per centum less likely to report card good wellness than their married counterparts were.
One explanation, Liu suggested, is that the stress of widowhood leads to greater health problems for widowers, compared to their marital peers.
The Journal of Health and Social Behavior is the quarterly journal of the American Sociological Association. http://www.asanet.org
"The times they are a changin': married status and health differentials from 1972 to 2003."
Liu H, Umberson DJ.
J Health Soc Behav 49(3), 2008.
The Journal of Health and Social Behavior
More information
