Gender, Health, And Marriage Analysis Of Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey

The current paper represents a comprehensive review of marital status and mortality, including its mediating mechanisms and three major moderating factors. Specifically, this review focuses on comparing three classic theories of mediating mechanism, and disputes in gender difference, age difference and cultural difference. In three mediating model, we find that they all work through three mediating factors(social support, economic well-being, and physical and mental health). However, there is no precise measurement of social support and mental health, thus it needs a standard measurement of these mediating factors in order to deepen our understanding of its mechanism. Before age of70, men seem to benefit more from marriage, but after age of70the difference is disappeared. Because the protective effect of marriage on mortality decreases when age grow, and male seems to decline quicker than female. Only a few studies have been done outside western nations, it requires more researches to investigate the cultural difference in protective effect of marriage. The literature on marriage and mortality is characterized by considerable methodological problems, and further research is needed to gain a better understanding of this problem.The current paper examines the intersection between gender and marriage among Chinese oldest-old adults, focusing on association of marriage and health. Data were derived from the2005and2008waves of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS), which included15,638Chinese averaging86years old. Marriage was measured in two dimensions:currently marital status (currently married vs. not married); Marriage history (one time of marriage vs. several times of marriage). Using multinomial logistic regression models, I found that marriage decreased men’s risks of mortality and having ADL disability. Whereas, currently married women only had advantages in ADL ability over single women. This pattern of associations between marriage and health by gender may reflect the distinctive influence of the Asian context on relations between men and women, such as traditional gender roles. In terms of marriage history, I only found that women who have been only married once had lower risk of rating themselves as poor health relative to rate themselves as good health than women who have been married more than once. There was no significant association between marriage history and health for oldest-old men.