Kristi Williams

Marital status, marital transitions, and health: a gendered life course perspective.

We work from a life course perspective to assess the impact of marital status and marital transitions on subsequent changes in the self-assessed physical health of men and women. Our results suggest three central conclusions regarding the association of marital status and marital transitions with self-assessed health. First, marital status differences in health appear to reflect the strains of marital dissolution more than they reflect any benefits of marriage. Second, the strains of marital dissolution undermine the self-assessed health of men but not women. Finally, life course stage is as important as gender in moderating the effects of marital status and marital transitions on health.

You Make Me Sick: Marital Quality and Health Over the Life Course*

We work from a life course perspective and identify several reasons to expect age and gender differences in the link between marital quality and health. We present growth curve evidence from a national longitudinal survey to show that marital strain accelerates the typical decline in self-rated health that occurs over time and that this adverse effect is greater at older ages. These findings fit with recent theoretical work on cumulative adversity in that marital strain seems to have a cumulative effect on health over time—an effect that produces increasing vulnerability to marital strain with age. Contrary to expectations, marital quality seems to affect the health of men and women in similar ways across the life course.

Has the Future of Marriage Arrived? A Contemporary Examination of Gender, Marriage, and Psychological Well-Being

A long tradition of research and theory on gender, marriage, and mental health suggests that marital status is more important to mens psychological well-being than womens while marital quality is more important to womens well-being than mens. These beliefs rest largely on a theoretical and empirical foundation established in the 1970s, but, despite changes in gender and family roles, they have rarely been questioned. The present analysis of three waves of a nationally representative survey indicates that, with few exceptions, the effects of marital status, marital transitions, and marital quality on psychological well-being are similar for men and women. Further, for men and women, occupying an unsatisfying marriage undermines psychological well-being to a similar extent--and, in some cases, to a greater extent--than exiting marriage or being continually unmarried.

Perceived Housework Equity, Marital Happiness, and Divorce in Dual-Earner Households:

This study uses a nationally representative sample of individuals involved in dual-earner marriages to examine the relationship between perceived fairness of housework completion, marital happiness, and divorce. The authors expected to find that perceived inequality in the division of housework causes tension between spouses that leads to decreased marital quality for both men and women. They further speculated that an unfair division of household labor might contribute to a greater likelihood of divorce. Results indicate that perceived inequity in the division of household labor is negatively associated with both husbands[#X2019] and wives[#X2019]reported marital happiness but is positively associated with the odds of divorce among wives only. Little evidence indicates that marital happiness mediates this relationship. The authors propose that unfair perceptions of the division of household labor not only decrease women[#X2019]s marital quality but also lead to role strain that makes them more likely to end unsatisfying marriages.

As Good as it Gets? A Life Course Perspective on Marital Quality

Marital relationships, like individuals, follow a developmental trajectory over time with ups and downs and gains and losses. We work from a life course perspective and use growth curve analysis to look at trajectories of change in marital quality over time. Although the tendency is for marital quality to decline over time, some groups begin with much higher levels of marital quality than others. Moreover, a number of life course and contextual factors can accelerate or slow this path of change. Our findings point to the importance of considering the multi-dimensionality of time (e.g., age, marital duration, the passage of years) as well as family transitions (e.g., having children, emptying or refilling the nest) in creating the meanings and experiences of marriage over time.

Depression and the psychological benefits of entering marriage.

Past research has consistently documented the positive relationship between a transition to marriage and psychological well-being. In this study, we separate the depressed from the nondepressed to assess whether the benefits marriage has for psychological well-being depend on premarital depression. We also examine whether the effect of marital quality in moderating the psychological consequences of marriage differs for the depressed and the nondepressed. Results indicate that, on average, those who were depressed prior to marrying report larger psychological gains from marriage than those who were not depressed. The role of marital quality in moderating the effect of marriage on psychological well-being is similar for previously depressed and previously nondepressed respondents. These findings call into question the assumption that marriage is always a good choice for all individuals. What appear to be strong average benefits of marriage are actually highly dependent on a range of individual, interpersonal, and structural characteristics.

Race, Gender, and Chains of Disadvantage Childhood Adversity, Social Relationships, and Health

We use a life course approach to guide an investigation of relationships and health at the nexus of race and gender. We consider childhood as a sensitive period in the life course, during which significant adversity may launch chains of disadvantage in relationships throughout the life course that then have cumulative effects on health over time. Data from a nationally representative panel study (Americans’ Changing Lives, N = 3,477) reveal substantial disparities between black and white adults, especially pronounced among men, in the quality of close relationships and in the consequences of these relationships for health. Greater childhood adversity helps to explain why black men have worse health than white men, and some of this effect appears to operate through childhood adversity’s enduring influence on relationship strain in adulthood. Stress that occurs in adulthood plays a greater role than childhood adversity in explaining racial disparities in health among women.

Marital Quality, Health, and Aging: Gender Equity?

Marital quality is a multidimensional concept that includes positive experiences such as feeling loved, cared for, and satisfied in the relationship as well as negative experiences such as demands from one’s spouse and marital conflict. A few studies find no gender difference on some measures of marital quality, although most studies find lower levels of marital quality for women on most measures (e.g., Rogers & Amato, 2000). The few studies that consider how marital quality changes over time conclude that marital quality tends to decline over time (positive dimensions decline and negative dimensions increase) in a similar fashion for men and women even though women have lower baseline levels of marital quality (Umberson, Williams, Powers, Chen, & Campbell, in press; VanLaningham, Johnson, & Amato, 2001). Notably, we find no studies that report poorer marital quality states or trajectories for men than for women—no matter how marital quality is defined. Recent research shows that marital quality is associated with physical health in the general population and in clinical studies (for a review, see Umberson, Williams, Powers, Liu, & Needham, in press). Several of these studies address the possibility that the health of women is more vulnerable to poor marital quality than is the health of men. Clinical and laboratory-based studies tend to find evidence of female vulnerability to poor marital quality, whereas population-based longitudinal studies on the general health consequences of both positive and negative dimensions of marital quality fail to reveal a gender difference. All of these studies focus on the issue of gender vulnerability and do not take into account that women may be exposed to lower levels of marital quality relative to men. If this is the case, then studies concluding that there is no gender difference in the impact of marital quality on health may be overemphasizing the issue of vulnerability and underemphasizing basic gender differences in exposure to low levels of marital quality. Moreover, gender differences in exposure to marital difficulties may be more exaggerated at certain points in the life course—for example, early in the marital life course when young children are more likely to be in the home or late in the life course when health and disability become more likely. If women sustain a lower level of marital quality relative to men over the life course, this may ultimately translate into a significant health disadvantage for married women. We use growth-curve analysis to consider how gender and age jointly predict trajectories of change in one dimension of marital quality over time. In addition, we illustrate how gender differences in that measure may contribute to gender inequity in physical health over the life course.

Nonmarital Childbearing, Union History, and Women’s Health at Midlife

Despite high rates of nonmarital childbearing in the United States, little is known about the health of women who have nonmarital births. We use data from the NLSY79 to examine differences in age 40 self-assessed health between women who had a premarital birth and those whose first birth occurred within marriage. We then differentiate women with a premarital first birth according to their subsequent union histories and estimate the effect of marrying or cohabiting versus remaining never-married on midlife self-assessed health. We pay particular attention to the paternity status of a mother’s partner and the stability of marital unions. To partially address selection bias, we employ multivariate propensity score techniques. Results suggest that premarital childbearing is negatively associated with midlife health for white and black women, but not for Hispanic women. We find no evidence that the negative health consequences of nonmarital childbearing are mitigated by either marriage or cohabitation for black women. For other women, only enduring marriage to the child’s biological father is associated with better health than remaining unpartnered.

Family Status and Mental Health: Recent Advances and Future Directions

Some of the earliest and most well-known sociological studies showed that marriage was beneficial to mental health, marriage benefited the mental health of men more than women, and parenthood caused psychological distress, especially for women. However, recent longitudinal research, reviewed in this chapter, questions these basic relationships. Recent studies show that though marriage is associated with improved mental health, these improvements are more modest than previously suggested and depend on other factors such as marital quality, race, and age. Cohabitors have higher psychological well-being than the single, though not as high as the married. Longitudinal studies suggest no gender difference in the average mental health benefit associated with transition into marriage. Recent research confirms that parenthood increases psychological distress, especially for young single parents. Future research should use an intersectionality framework to examine how multiple stratification systems work together to influence the relationship between family status and mental health.