Marital Quality and Sexual Frequency among Disease-Afflicted Older Adults

• In Event: 4266 - Section on Aging and the Life Course Refereed Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable 100min: 6. Gender and Sexuality

Abstract

I work from a stress-buffering perspective to examine how marital quality is related to the sexual frequency of partnered older adults who are afflicted with one or more chronic diseases. I use data from the first two waves of the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (N=1,012) to run regression models with lagged dependent variables. I find that an increase in older adults’ positive marital quality over time, as well as higher positive marital quality at baseline for men, is related to higher sexual frequency five years later. Additionally, an increase in older adults’ negative marital quality, as well as a higher baseline level of negative marital quality for men, is related to lower sexual frequency five years later. By analyzing a unique, unhealthy sample, the results demonstrate that marital quality may be one way that disease-afflicted adults can protect their sexual activity in later life.

Author

• Shannon Shen, Texas A&M University-San Antonio