Elwert Felix, Christakis Nicholas A
Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA.
Demography. 2008 Nov;45(4):851-73. doi: 10.1353/dem.0.0029.
Increased mortality following the death of a spouse (the "widowhood effect") may be due to (1) causation, (2) bias from spousal similarity (homogamy), or (3) bias from shared environmental exposures. This article proposes new tests for bias in the widowhood effect by examining husbands, wives, and ex-wives in a longitudinal sample of over 1 million elderly Americans. If the death of an ex-wife has no causal effect on the mortality of her husband, then an observed association between the mortality of an ex-wife and her husband may indicate bias, while the absence of an effect of an ex-wife's death on her husband's mortality would discount the possibility of homogamy bias (and also of one type of shared-exposure bias). Results from three empirical tests provide strong evidence for an effect of a current wife's death on her husband's mortality yet no statistically significant evidence for an effect of an ex-wife's death on her husband's mortality. These results strengthen the causal interpretation of the widowhood effect by suggesting that the widowhood effect is not due to homogamy bias to any substantial degree.
配偶死亡后死亡率上升（“寡妇效应”）可能归因于：（1）因果关系；（2）配偶相似性（同质性）导致的偏差；或（3）共同环境暴露导致的偏差。本文通过对100多万美国老年人的纵向样本中的丈夫、妻子和前妻进行研究，提出了针对寡妇效应偏差的新测试方法。如果前妻的死亡对其丈夫的死亡率没有因果影响，那么观察到的前妻死亡率与其丈夫死亡率之间的关联可能表明存在偏差，而前妻死亡对其丈夫死亡率没有影响则可以排除同质性偏差（以及一种共同暴露偏差）的可能性。三项实证测试的结果有力地证明了现任妻子的死亡对其丈夫死亡率有影响，但没有统计学上的显著证据表明前妻的死亡对其丈夫死亡率有影响。这些结果通过表明寡妇效应在很大程度上并非由同质性偏差所致，从而加强了对寡妇效应的因果解释。
