Do the Married Really Live Longer? The Role of Cohabitation and Socioeconomic Status

Numerous studies have shown that married women and men experience the lowest mortality. Legal marital status, however, does not necessarily reflect today's social reality because individuals are classified as never married, widowed, or divorced even when they are living with a partner. Denmark...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of marriage and family 2012-06, Vol.74 (3), p.462-475
Main Author: Drefahl, Sven
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age
Aging problems. Death
Attrition (Research Studies)
Cohabitation
Collaboration
Couples
Death & dying
Demographics
Denmark
Dying
Empirical research
Females
Health Behavior
Interpersonal Relationship
Life expectancy
living arrangement
Living arrangements
Males
Marital Status
Marriage
Married persons
Men
Mental Health
Mortality
Mortality Rates
Regression analysis
Resource Materials
Risk factors
Same sex marriage
Sex Differences
Sexuality. Marriage. Family relations
Single status
Social Control
Socioeconomic Status
Socioeconomics
Sociology
Sociology of the family. Age groups
Studies
Widowed
Wives
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Summary:Numerous studies have shown that married women and men experience the lowest mortality. Legal marital status, however, does not necessarily reflect today's social reality because individuals are classified as never married, widowed, or divorced even when they are living with a partner. Denmark is one of the forerunners of developments in coresidential partnerships and one of only a few countries where administrative sources provide individual-level information on cohabitation for the whole population. Using register information from Statistics Denmark on 3,888,072 men and women ages 18—65, the author investigated mortality differences by living arrangement with hazard regression models. Overall, premature mortality was found to be lowest for married persons, followed by cohabiting persons. Adjusting for socioeconomic status reduced excess mortality of nonmarried individuals. Moreover, a mortalitycrossover effect emerged in which cohabiters with above-average socioeconomic status had a lower risk of dying than married people. This finding was particularly pronounced for men.
ISSN:0022-2445
1741-3737
DOI:10.1111/j.1741-3737.2012.00968.x