Volume 44 - Article 41 | Pages 993–1022  

Marital dissolutions and changes in mental health: Evidence from rural Malawi

By Tyler W. Myroniuk, Hans-Peter Kohler, Iliana Kohler

Abstract

Background: Advancing efforts to unpack the complex relationship between marital dissolutions and health outcomes increasingly requires assessing the marital histories and health of individuals who have lived long enough to experience divorce or widowhood ‒ or even multiples of each ‒ and measurable changes in health.

Objective: To explore this line of inquiry, we chose a sample from rural Malawi where a high prevalence of marital dissolutions and remarrying exists, as an ideal theoretical foil to the predominant literature found in high-income countries (HICs). We examine if changes in having experienced a marital dissolution, one’s total number of dissolutions, and the percentage of one’s life spent outside of marriage since first becoming married are associated with changes in mental health.

Methods: Our analyses focus on 1,266 respondents aged 45 years and older who participated in the 2012 Mature Adults Cohort of the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH-MAC), linked back to cohort information from 2008 and 2010 available through the MLSFH. Fixed-effects regressions guide our inferences over the 2008, 2010, and 2012 waves of data.

Results: For men, spending more life outside of marriage is associated with worse mental health, while more marital dissolutions are surprisingly associated with better mental health for women.

Conclusions: These results could suggest that larger portions of one’s life spent unmarried are associated with a type of role strain for men or simply that men are burdened with taking up tasks that their spouses had previously done in order to survive. For women, many may have gotten out of ‘bad’ marriages that otherwise would have been detrimental to their mental health and/or those in good mental health are the ones able to remarry.

Contribution: Our research from rural Malawi provides a type of litmus test for many HICs where marriage, remarriage, and dissolution rates are lower but quite consequential for mental health outcomes. Measuring time outside of marriage should be more strongly considered in such settings. These results also inform increasingly important research on the relationship between marital dissolutions and mental health in other African nations as noncommunicable diseases play a continually more important role in people’s lives.

Author's Affiliation

Other articles by the same author/authors in Demographic Research

Intergenerational Transfers in the Era of HIV/AIDS: Evidence from Rural Malawi
Volume 27 - Article 27

Frailty Modelling for Adult and Old Age Mortality: The Application of a Modified DeMoivre Hazard Function to Sex Differentials in Mortality
Volume 3 - Article 8

Shocks and migration in Malawi
Volume 38 - Article 14

Household structure vs. composition: Understanding gendered effects on educational progress in rural South Africa
Volume 37 - Article 59

The population-level impact of public-sector antiretroviral therapy rollout on adult mortality in rural Malawi
Volume 36 - Article 37

The Likoma Network Study: Context, data collection and initial results
Volume 21 - Article 15

Subjective expectations in the context of HIV/AIDS in Malawi
Volume 20 - Article 31

The Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project 2004-06: Data collection, data quality, and analysis of attrition
Volume 20 - Article 21

Overestimating HIV infection:: The construction and accuracy of subjective probabilities of HIV infection in rural Malawi
Volume 20 - Article 6

Educational differences in all-cause mortality by marital status: Evidence from Bulgaria, Finland and the United States
Volume 19 - Article 60

Comparative mortality levels among selected species of captive animals
Volume 15 - Article 14

A summary of Special Collection 1: Social Interactions and HIV/AIDS in Rural Africa
Volume 9 - Article 12

The Fertility Pattern of Twins and the General Population Compared: Evidence from Danish Cohorts 1945-64
Volume 6 - Article 14

Integrated Information System for Demographic Statistics 'ESGRAON-TDS' in Bulgaria
Volume 6 - Article 12

Tempo-Adjusted Period Parity Progression Measures:: Assessing the Implications of Delayed Childbearing for Cohort Fertility in Sweden, the Netherlands and Spain
Volume 6 - Article 7

Tempo-Adjusted Period Parity Progression Measures, Fertility Postponement and Completed Cohort Fertility
Volume 6 - Article 6

Attrition in Longitudinal Household Survey Data: Some Tests for Three Developing-Country Samples
Volume 5 - Article 4

Empirical Assessments of Social Networks, Fertility and Family Planning Programs: Nonlinearities and their Implications
Volume 3 - Article 7

Gender Preferences for Children in Europe: Empirical Results from 17 FFS Countries
Volume 2 - Article 1

Talking about AIDS: The influence of communication networks on individual risk perceptions of HIV/AIDS infection and favored protective behaviors in South Nyanza District, Kenya
Special Collection 1 - Article 13

Introduction to "Research on Demographic Aspects of HIV/AIDS in Rural Africa"
Special Collection 1 - Article 1

Most recent similar articles in Demographic Research

Ultra-Orthodox fertility and marriage in the United States: Evidence from the American Community Survey
Volume 49 - Article 29    | Keywords: age at first marriage, American Community Survey (ACS), fertility, Judaism, marriage, religion, total fertility rate (TFR), Ultra-Orthodox Judaism

Do couples who use fertility treatments divorce more? Evidence from the US National Survey of Family Growth
Volume 49 - Article 23    | Keywords: childbirth, divorce, fertility treatments, socioeconomic determinants

Separation as an accelerator of housing inequalities: Parents’ and children’s post-separation housing careers in Sweden
Volume 49 - Article 4    | Keywords: divorce, family, housing, income inequality, neighborhood, parental separation, residential mobility, stratification

Subnational variations in births and marriages during the COVID-19 pandemic in South Korea
Volume 48 - Article 30    | Keywords: COVID-19, fertility, Korea, marriage

Introduction to the Special Collection on The new roles of women and men and implications for families and societies
Volume 48 - Article 29    | Keywords: divorce, economic uncertainties, fertility, gender equality, well-being, women's employment