Marriage at the Intersection: An Intersectional Analysis of Marital Quality on Self-Rated Health

• In Event: 3129 - Section on Medical Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 12. Marriage, Relationships, and Parenting

Abstract

Existing research indicates marriage has a positive impact on one’s overall health. Although research has explored marital quality’s nuanced operationalization, research has not considered the way marital quality may operate in racialized and gendered ways. Both race and gender operate as social structures meaning marital quality, as a case in point, may operate differently for individuals occupying certain social situations and therefore may influence self-rated health differently as well. We explore how the effects of marital quality on health are not just gendered or racialized, but is instead different across intersecting structural inequalities utilizing two-waves of data from the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project.
Our results indicate that contrary to prior research, only White men show a marginal decrease in self-rated with decreasing marital quality, while Black women show an increase in self-rated health with increasing negative marital quality. Given our unexpected results, we turn to explore whether or not traditionally aggregated-measures of marital quality adequately load across populations using explanatory factor analysis. In these analyses, we find more nuance than originally identified in the full sample or race/gender stratified models. The exploratory factor analysis results indicate only one factor was consistent across all of our respondents’ categories: reliance on one’s partner.
Our findings indicate that race and gender operate in a pervasive manner all social spaces, including the experiences of individual in married and cohabitating relationships. When embarking on sociological and other social-based research, it is important for scholars to consider the potentially racialized and gendered nature of their measures to be certain the results obtained adequately represent individual and structural experiences. This acts as a call for not only scholars of marriage and health, but sociology broadly, to consider the manner in which assumed measures, such as marital quality, need to be explored critical social axes.

Authors

• Jennifer Audrey Andersen, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

• Shawn M. Ratcliff, University of Nebraska-Lincoln