Widowhood and mortality among the elderly: The modifying role of neighborhood concentration of widowed individuals

Abstract

The effect of death of a spouse on the mortality of the survivor (the "widowhood effect") is wellestablished. We investigated how the effect of widowhood on mortality depends on the neighborhood concentration of widowed individuals in the United States. We developed a large, nationally representative, and longitudinal dataset from Medicare claims and other data sources characterizing 200,000 elderly couples, with nine years of follow-up (1993-2002), and estimated multilevel grouped discrete-time hazard models. In neighborhoods with a low concentration of widowed individuals, widowhood increased the odds of death for men by 22% and for women by 17%, compared to 17% for men, and 15% for women in neighborhoods with a high concentration of widowed individuals. Our findings suggest that neighborhood structural contexts -that provide opportunities for interacting with others and favoring new social engagements -could be potential modifiers of the widowhood effects and as such requires more systematic consideration in future research of widowhood effects on well-being and mortality.

Connective recovery in social networks after the death of a friend

“…It is likely that networks do not always adapt to a loss and network-level recovery might not translate into recovery at the individual level; notably, we were not able to evaluate both connective recovery and the subjective experience of loss here. Evidence on recovery among widows, for example, suggests that social support from friends does not often compensate for the loss of a spouse 28 and that recovery may depend on a shared loss, as widowed individuals fare better when they live close to others who have experienced the death of a spouse 29 . Furthermore, the apparently smooth trajectories of network recovery seen here might correspond to noisier oscillations in recovery at the individual level 30 .…”

Marital status, social capital, material conditions and self-rated health: A population-based study

“…A recent US study found that widows/widowers living in neighbourhoods with low population proportions of widows/widowers had a 22% increased mortality risk among men and 17% among women compared to the married, while the increased mortality risk was 17% among men and 15% among women in neighbourhoods with high proportions of widows/widowers [26].…”

How much of the variation in mortality across Norwegian municipalities is explained by the socio-demographic characteristics of the population?

“…Effects of individual marital status were as expected (Roelfs et al, 2011;Shor et al, 2012). Only a few studies have estimated effects of the family structure in the community on health, health behaviour or mortality (Kravdal, 2007;Thorlindson et al, 2012), or considered the importance of family structure as a conditioning variable (Burrows et al, 2011;Huijts and Kraaykamp, 2011;Subramanian et al, 2008). In our data, a high proportion divorced was linked to high mortality (in the absence of the controls for constant unobserved municipality factors that were included in the earlier Norwegian study by Kravdal, 2007).…”