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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?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by dcollins on Wednesday August 12 2015, @10:40PM
"Correlation does not imply Causation" -- I'm actually hyper-critical about people who sling this phrase around too much in improper cases, but here's a golden example where it does apply.
The headline here & the original Ars Technica article, "Cohabitation is good for you", is totally unwarranted. Now, the findings do say that married & cohabiting people are healthier than people who live alone. But this could be either X causes Y, or Y causes X, or other more complicated interactions. One hypothesis is that "cohabitation is good for you [by improving health]"; another hypothesis is that "being healthy is good for your prospects of getting a partner", i.e., healthy people make for more attractive marriage/cohabitation partners. If you think about it, I'd say that the latter is actually the more common-sense direction of the causation here.
How could the direction of this effect be formally disentangled? Well, you could be on the lookout for a "natural experiment" where someone who did manage to get married/cohabited breaks up or gets divorced, and see if their health degrades during the later period in which they lack a partner. Of course, the researchers here were smart enough to do exactly that, and an entire paragraph of the Ars Technica article is in fact devoted to these findings:
"The study found that changes in status had no obvious impact—the transitions from/to marriage and nonmarital cohabitation did not have a detrimental effect on health. There wasn’t an obvious difference in these biomarkers when participants divorced and then remarried or cohabitated; they looked the same as participants who remained married. For men who divorced in their late 30s and didn’t remarry, the risk of metabolic syndromes in midlife was reduced."
In other words, for anyone in the category of at least being healthy and attractive enough to get married/cohabited once, being married or cohabited made no difference to their health. Which to my eye is overwhelming evidence that the causation is in the other direction, i.e., these headlines of "cohabitation is good for you" are flat-out wrong.
Might be a good example to include in my fall statistics course.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by inertnet on Thursday August 13 2015, @12:00AM
Well, maybe they just didn't think hard enough what the cause of the effect could be. It could be as simple as married men on average eat healthier food than single men. I know I do, being happily married to a former cook.
(Score: 2) by dcollins on Thursday August 13 2015, @01:22AM
Hypothetically it could be; but the evidence in the study says otherwise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @12:11AM
"Correlation does not imply Causation" -- I'm actually hyper-critical about people who sling this phrase around too much in improper cases, but here's a golden example where it does apply.
And it applies to most of the garbage studies about the benefits of marriage as well, but those (and this) have numerous other flaws (such as attempting to measure subjective emotions and then pretending to be objective). Social 'science' studies can largely be disregarded.