Myroniuk Tyler W, Kohler Hans-Peter, Kohler Iliana V
University of Missouri, Department of Public Health, 825 Lewis Hall, 65211 Columbia, MO, USA.
Population Aging Research Center (PARC) and Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania., USA.
Demogr Res. 2021 Jan-Jun;44:993-1022. doi: 10.4054/demres.2021.44.41. Epub 2021 May 12.
Advancing efforts to unpack the complex relationship between marital dissolutions and health outcomes increasingly requires assessing the marital histories and health of individuals who have lived long enough to experience divorce or widowhood ‒ or even multiples of each ‒ and measurable changes in health.
To explore this line of inquiry, we chose a sample from rural Malawi where a high prevalence of marital dissolutions and remarrying exists, as an ideal theoretical foil to the predominant literature found in high-income countries (HICs). We examine if changes in having experienced a marital dissolution, one's total number of dissolutions, and the percentage of one's life spent outside of marriage since first becoming married are associated with changes in mental health.
Our analyses focus on 1,266 respondents aged 45 years and older who participated in the 2012 Mature Adults Cohort of the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH-MAC), linked back to cohort information from 2008 and 2010 available through the MLSFH. Fixed-effects regressions guide our inferences over the 2008, 2010, and 2012 waves of data.
For men, spending more life outside of marriage is associated with worse mental health, while more marital dissolutions are surprisingly associated with better mental health for women.
These results could suggest that larger portions of one's life spent unmarried are associated with a type of role strain for men or simply that men are burdened with taking up tasks that their spouses had previously done in order to survive. For women, many may have gotten out of 'bad' marriages that otherwise would have been detrimental to their mental health and/or those in good mental health are the ones able to remarry.
Our research from rural Malawi provides a type of litmus test for many HICs where marriage, remarriage, and dissolution rates are lower but quite consequential for mental health outcomes. Measuring time outside of marriage should be more strongly considered in such settings. These results also inform increasingly important research on the relationship between marital dissolutions and mental health in other African nations as noncommunicable diseases play a continually more important role in people's lives.
要进一步剖析婚姻解体与健康结果之间的复杂关系，越来越需要评估那些活到足以经历离婚或丧偶（甚至多次经历）以及健康状况发生可测量变化的个体的婚姻史和健康状况。
为了探索这一研究方向，我们从马拉维农村选取了一个样本，该地区婚姻解体和再婚的发生率很高，作为高收入国家（HICs）主流文献的理想理论对照。我们研究经历婚姻解体的变化、解体的总数以及自初婚以来在婚姻之外度过的生命百分比是否与心理健康的变化相关。
我们的分析聚焦于1266名45岁及以上的受访者，他们参与了2012年马拉维家庭与健康纵向研究（MLSFH-MAC）的成年队列研究，并与通过MLSFH获得的2008年和2010年的队列信息相关联。固定效应回归指导我们对2008年、2010年和2012年的数据进行推断。
对于男性来说，在婚姻之外度过更多生命与较差的心理健康相关，而对于女性来说，更多的婚姻解体却出人意料地与较好的心理健康相关。
这些结果可能表明，男性生命中较大比例的未婚时间与一种角色压力相关，或者仅仅是男性为了生存而承担起配偶以前做的任务。对于女性来说，许多人可能摆脱了“糟糕”的婚姻，否则这些婚姻会对她们的心理健康有害，和/或心理健康良好的女性才能够再婚。
我们来自马拉维农村的研究为许多高收入国家提供了一种试金石，在这些国家，婚姻、再婚和解体率较低，但对心理健康结果影响重大。在这种情况下，应更强烈地考虑测量婚姻之外的时间。这些结果也为其他非洲国家关于婚姻解体与心理健康关系的日益重要的研究提供了信息，因为非传染性疾病在人们的生活中发挥着越来越重要的作用。
