Is Marriage Good for Your Health, NY Times Asks

Is Marriage Good for Your Health, NY Times Asks
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Coming this Sunday to the New York Times Magazine (already available online here) is an article by Tara Parker-Pope titled, "Is marriage good for your health?" Compared to so much else that has been written on the topic, Parker-Pope advances the argument in a significant way with this statement:

"The mere fact of being married, it seems, isn't enough to protect your health."

Much of the rest of the article appears to be addressing a more specific question: Is a good marriage good for your health?

The question you should ask is the same one I urge students in my research methods classes to pose: Compared to what?

Is a good marriage better than a bad marriage? I don't have any doubts about that, and Parker-Pope describes some ingenious studies of how couples who fight in particularly hostile ways actually have wounds that heal more slowly than couples who are not as nasty. It is not so surprising, though, that a good marriage is better than a bad one.

What about the more interesting question of whether life in a good marriage is better than a comparable single life? Research on marital status is a burgeoning long-standing industry, complete with decades of journals, books, doctoral programs, research funding, conferences, paid spokespersons, and advocacy groups. But the question of whether life in a good marriage is better than a comparable single life is, so far as I know, unanswered.

Simply comparing good marriages to bad ones obviously does not answer the question. But neither do other studies that, on the surface, seem headed to an answer. Suppose, for example, that you are a researcher who believes that marriage is good for you. But when you do your study, you don't find the advantage you were looking for. Well, then you can look at the people who are happily married (or who fight constructively, or who regard their spouse as a confidant, or whatever other criterion you want to choose for skimming the most successfully married people off the top of the group) and see if they look better than single people.

Do you see what's wrong with that? If not, consider this hypothetical study. A cruise line, Royal Pacific, wants to claim that its travelers are happier than those who board a competing line, Cruise Festival. When they first look at the data, though, they find no differences. So now they choose only those Royal Pacific travelers who are happiest with their cruising experience, and compare them to all of the Cruise Festival travelers. Then they air a chirpy ad claiming that happy Royal Pacific vacationers are happier than Cruise Festival vacationers.

That's obviously dopey, right? Yet, of all of the studies that look at a select sub-group of married people, I don't know of any that compare the skimmed-off-the-top marrieds to a comparable group of skimmed-off-the-top single people. (If I've missed any, please let me know.) In fact, you can even find claims made by celebrated scholars, and published in reputable sources, that are just like the hypothetical Royal Pacific boast. For example, E. Mavis Hetherington, in her book on divorce, states, "happily married couples are healthier, happier, wealthier, and sexier than are singles, especially single men." Seriously. That claim got by a co-author, an editor, everyone else at a major publishing house who might have seen it, and any colleagues who may have read it in advance of publication.

What the NY Times Article Still Gets Wrong

Early in the article, Parker-Pope proclaims that in 150 years of research, "scientists have continued to document the 'marriage advantage': the fact that married people, on average, appear to be healthier and happier and live longer than single people." She precedes that statement with a qualifier: "Critics, of course, have rightly cautioned about the risk of conflating correlation with causation. (Better health among the married sometimes simply reflects the fact that healthy people are more likely to get married in the first place.)." Parker-Pope is correct that this is the chink in the marriage-wins armor that researchers are most inclined to acknowledge. But it is not at all the biggest problem with the "currently-married people are better" argument. (Continue reading here.)

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