Sex, Marital Status, and Mortality

This paper explores the relationship between marital status and mortality for both men and women. It is shown that, controlling for age, the married have lower mortality rates than the single, the widowed, or the divorced and that the differences between the married and unmarried statuses are much greater for men than for women. It is argued that these relationships can, at least in part, be attributed to the characteristics of the marital statuses in our society, for: (1) precisely the same pattern is found in studies of psychlogical wellbeing and mental illness; (2) the evidence from specific types of mortality indicates that this pattern is characteristic primarily of types of mortality in which one's psychological state may greatly affect one's life chances; (3) a role explanation can account for the way the pattern varies with changes in age; and (4) it appears that the alternative explanation, namely, that the relationship are due to selective process, does not account for most of the variation in rates.