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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday August 12 2015, @08:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the so-I-didn't-have-to-get-married??? dept.

a new study published in AJPH indicates that adults who are cohabitating have midlife health outcomes that are similar to adults in formal marriages. So in terms of the benefits specific to marriage, we can probably strike "longer, healthier life" from the list.

The study in question used 10,000 subjects from the British national Child Development Study, a birth cohort study that includes all people born in Britain during one week in March 1958. Participants were able to select their partnership status as married, cohabitating, or single. Health was measured using blood and inflammatory biomarkers, as well as respiratory capacity. The researchers controlled for previous socioeconomic status, previous health status, educational attainment, income, employment, and other demographic variables.

The study's results varied by gender. Among men, those who had never married/cohabitated displayed poorer overall health than men who were married during the observation period. By contrast, not marrying or cohabitating had less of a detrimental effect on women than on men. For women, the timing of the marriage mattered. Those who were married in their late 20s or early 30s had the overall best health, beating out both women who had married in their early 20s and women were never married/cohabitating.

Does co-habitating with cats or dogs count?


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  • (Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday August 12 2015, @09:57PM

    by kurenai.tsubasa (5227) on Wednesday August 12 2015, @09:57PM (#221951) Journal

    Reporting is always the bugbear in these matters. This summary piece [heritage.org] is from The Heritage Foundation so obvious bias, but I don't believe the numbers are unreliable:

    The DOJ's National Crime Victimization Survey collects data on victimization through an ongoing survey of a nationally representative sample of Americans. The survey defines violent crime as rape, sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. Domestic or intimate abuse is defined as violent crimes performed by a spouse, former spouse, boyfriend, or former boyfriend.

    Ten years of NCVS data (from 1992 to 2001) reveal interesting patterns among mothers (ages 20-50) with children under the age of 12.4 Specifically:
    Never-married mothers experience more domestic abuse. Among those who have ever married (those married, divorced, or separated), the annual rate of domestic violence is 12.9 per 1,000 mothers. Among mothers who have never married, the annual domestic violence rate is 26.3 per 1,000.

    (Emphasis mine, standard disclaimer about the survey method's own bugbears.)

    The American Bar Association has an extensive collection of links to studies [americanbar.org] for further analysis, but I'm feeling too lazy at the moment to stare down that mountain of data.

    My question is how those data compare to ever-married and never-married men, and of course that doesn't answer the corresponding question about men and women who choose not to have children either. The answer to our questions may be somewhere in data mountain, so I may revisit it if nobody has a link off the top of their head.

    My conjecture would be that this all probably correlates with impulsiveness.

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