Late-Life Widowhood and Economic Well-Being in Türkiye and the United States

• In Event: Aging and the Life Course Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 5: Marital Formation and Dissolution

Abstract

Widowhood is a significant life-course transition that poses profound challenges for older individuals, yet comparative evidence across welfare regimes remains limited, largely focusing on Western European contexts. In this study, we ask: how does widowhood, compared to other marital statuses, affect the economic well-being of older adults in two distinct policy contexts—Türkiye and the United States? Türkiye is a middle-income country with a hybrid, "immature" welfare regime shaped by Islamic charity traditions, familialist norms, and recent neoliberal reforms; the United States, by contrast, is a mature liberal welfare state emphasizing market-based provision. By pairing these two countries, we extend comparative research on aging and examine how welfare regime characteristics shape the economic vulnerabilities of widowed older adults. Using nationally representative microdata from the 2023 Türkiye Older Persons Profile Survey and the 2023 American Community Survey (IPUMS), we examine the impact of marital status on household income and poverty risk. We center widowed persons as the reference group—one of the most common marital statuses in later life—thereby challenging traditional models that treat the married as the comparison standard. We further examine whether marital status effects differ by gender and whether observed differences persist after accounting for education, employment status, Social Security receipt, social assistance receipt, co-residence with non-spousal household members (U.S.), and disability status. Our findings reveal that the economic consequences of marital status are neither uniform nor simply additive, but shaped by gendered institutional structures and cumulative life-course inequalities. Widowhood occupies an intermediate economic position in both countries: widowed older adults are generally more secure than divorced and never-married peers but less secure than the married. Gender gaps persist across both contexts, though structured differently by welfare regime. In Türkiye, derivative benefits partially buffer widows' risks while reinforcing dependency; in the United States, Social Security mitigates but does not eliminate post-bereavement vulnerability. Never-married men and divorced women emerge as especially precarious subgroups, yet understudied. These findings underscore the limitations of marriage-based social protection in aging societies facing increasingly diverse marital trajectories.

Authors

• Damla Topbas, Northeastern University

• Deborah Carr, Boston University