1 The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA.
2 The University of Texas-Austin, Austin, TX, USA.
J Health Soc Behav. 2018 Dec;59(4):554-568. doi: 10.1177/0022146518808718. Epub 2018 Nov 1.
Marriage benefits health in part because spouses promote one another's well-being, yet how spouses facilitate formal healthcare (e.g., doctor's visits, emergency care) via what we call healthcare work is unknown. Moreover, like other aspects of the marital-health link, healthcare work dynamics likely vary by gender and couple type. To explore this possibility, we use in-depth interviews with 90 midlife gay, lesbian, and heterosexual spouses to examine how spouses perform healthcare work. Our results show that in heterosexual marriage, women perform the bulk of healthcare work and typically do so in coercive ways. A minority of heterosexual men provide instrumental healthcare work for their wives. Gay and lesbian spouses appear to commonly use both coercive and supportive healthcare work strategies to effectively promote healthcare use. Our findings demonstrate the ways spouses are central to supporting and coercing one another to obtain medical care and how these patterns are gendered.
婚姻有益于健康，部分原因是配偶可以促进彼此的幸福，但配偶如何通过我们所谓的“医疗保健工作”促进正规的医疗保健（例如，就诊、急诊）尚不清楚。此外，与婚姻与健康关系的其他方面一样，医疗保健工作的动态可能因性别和夫妻类型而异。为了探索这种可能性，我们对 90 名中年同性恋、双性恋和异性恋配偶进行了深入访谈，以研究配偶如何进行医疗保健工作。我们的研究结果表明，在异性恋婚姻中，女性承担了大部分医疗保健工作，而且通常是以强制的方式进行的。少数异性恋男性会为妻子提供实质性的医疗保健工作。同性恋和双性恋配偶似乎通常会同时使用强制性和支持性的医疗保健工作策略，以有效地促进医疗保健的使用。我们的研究结果表明了配偶在支持和强制对方获得医疗保健方面的重要性，以及这些模式的性别差异。
