Marriage, Now with Fewer Benefits

Past research has shown a link between health and marriage, with people who are married scoring higher on all sorts of health assessments compared to a group simply known as “non-marrieds”. Research like this has always been a boon to politicians and interest groups who believe in promoting marriage (and by marriage of course they only mean heterosexual marriage) for personal, often religious or moral reasons. They have been able to argue that putting money towards pro-marriage campaigns is about improving the quality of health and not just appeasing their particular religious or moral agenda.

But new research to be published in the September issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior is complicating the picture, and suggesting that the money the government spends on trying to get everyone to marry (have you seen those billboards?) may be misguided.

The study took data from an annual survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics between the years 1972 to 2003 in an effort to look more carefully at the relationship between health and marriage over time. What they found was that while the health of people who are married is still higher than those who aren’t, the health status of those who aren’t married has been increasing over time and the gap is closing. From a prepared release:

The trend is due almost exclusively to a marked improvement in the self-reported health of never-married men. Liu said that may be partly because never-married men have greater access to social resources and support that historically were found in a spouse.

Further, the research shows that the health status of the never-married has improved for all race and gender groups examined: men, women, blacks and whites. (The health of married women also improved, while the health of married men remained stable.)

I found it interesting to read in the study that previous research failed to distinguish between groups of people who aren’t married (e.g. those who have never married, those who are divorced, and those who are widowed). This, the researchers argue, may be one reason why this trend hasn’t been spotted before. Also, probably, no one went looking. It's also interesting to quickly scan the headlines for articles on the study from various news publications. Most include some note about the narrowing gap, while others, like the Washington Post which I link to below, emphasize perhaps what's most important to them.

The study has a number of limitations, first among which is the fact that the data don’t offer any explanation for the trends because information that might explain it wasn’t collected. Nonetheless, one hopes that more research like this might be done and taken together it might dissuade the government from funding programs that have no basis in empirical science. After all, they’ll listen to science, won’t they?

Read more - Washington Post: Married Folks Still the Healthiest

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