by Linda J. Waite
Linda Waite is a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. This is an edited version of her remarks delivered on 14 November 2000 at Brigham Young University. Dr. Waite had recently published a book titled The Case for Marriage (Doubleday, 2000) with co-author Dr. Maggie Gallagher of the Institute for American Values.
. . . The book [The Case for Marriage] began more than five years ago as a study that I was doing for the National Institutes of Health with Lee Lillard, an economist now at the University of Michigan. We studied the relationship between marital status and mortality-the chance that someone will die. We used a large national survey and followed people over eighteen years. Some started out unmarried, and got married, and then got divorced. We could look at how the risk of dying changed for that same person when he or she was became married or unmarried.
What we found was dramatic. We found, to summarize briefly, that married men and married women are much less likely to die than otherwise comparable unmarried men and women. Our results implied that in a group of one hundred 48-year-old men, about sixty-five of them would be alive at age 65 if they were unmarried. In the same group of one hundred men, almost ninety would be alive at age 65 if they were married. For married women, we found the same gap, but smaller. So for unmarried women about eighty of one hundred would be alive, and for married women about ninety of one hundred would be alive at age 65. For both men and women, there were large, consistent effects after taking into account all the other characteristics of the individual.
Linda Waite is a professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. This is an edited version of her remarks delivered on 14 November 2000 at Brigham Young University. Dr. Waite had recently published a book titled The Case for Marriage (Doubleday, 2000) with co-author Dr. Maggie Gallagher of the Institute for American Values.
. . . The book [The Case for Marriage] began more than five years ago as a study that I was doing for the National Institutes of Health with Lee Lillard, an economist now at the University of Michigan. We studied the relationship between marital status and mortality-the chance that someone will die. We used a large national survey and followed people over eighteen years. Some started out unmarried, and got married, and then got divorced. We could look at how the risk of dying changed for that same person when he or she was became married or unmarried.
What we found was dramatic. We found, to summarize briefly, that married men and married women are much less likely to die than otherwise comparable unmarried men and women. Our results implied that in a group of one hundred 48-year-old men, about sixty-five of them would be alive at age 65 if they were unmarried. In the same group of one hundred men, almost ninety would be alive at age 65 if they were married. For married women, we found the same gap, but smaller. So for unmarried women about eighty of one hundred would be alive, and for married women about ninety of one hundred would be alive at age 65. For both men and women, there were large, consistent effects after taking into account all the other characteristics of the individual.
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