Bereavement is an inevitable event in our life. This paper employs the Taiwanese panel Survey of Health and Living Status of the Elderly (SHLSE) to evaluate the impact of losing a spouse on self-assessed health and subjective well-being measured by depression and life satisfaction. Propensity score matching methods are used to generate a hypothetical bereavement date and a weight for the non-bereaved to create a comparable non-bereaved cohort and a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach is used to estimate the impact of spousal bereavement. The results show that spousal bereavement increases depression scale by 1.81 points but this increment decreases by 0.43 points every year after bereavement. It takes approximate 4 years to restore to the level prior to bereavement. We also examine the demographic and socioeconomic differences in the spousal bereavement impact and find that the spousal bereavement impact is greater on the bereaved in the higher income group in terms of self-assessed health and depression. Our results only represent a lower boundary of the possible impact of spousal bereavement on self-assessed health and subjective wellbeing due to data restrictions.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ehb.2017.01.003 | DOI Listing |
Res Aging
December 2024
Department of Gerontology, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA.
The death of a family member is one of the life's most emotionally distressing experiences, yet its impact on self-perceptions of aging remains understudied. This study examines the relationship between the death of a family member and self-perceptions of aging among middle-aged and older adults using data from the 2014-2016 ( = 11,416). Four types of family death (father death, mother death, spousal death, and child death) were analyzed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArch Gerontol Geriatr
February 2025
Department of Behavioural Science and Health, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
Background: Widowhood negatively affects trajectories of social isolation and loneliness. Given the inevitability of spousal bereavement for many, further investigation into potential modifiers of bereavement-related loneliness is warranted.
Aim: To examine the moderating effects of social isolation, social support, sociodemographic, self-efficacy, health, and quality of life factors on changes in loneliness before and after widowhood.
Omega (Westport)
November 2024
Government Arts and Commerce College Larkano, Sindh, Pakistan.
Spousal loss among older persons is an emerging public health concern. Older adults from Pakistan's Sindh province may be particularly vulnerable when encountering the tragedy of spousal loss due to their age. Although resilience in older persons who live in social isolation has been researched extensively, less is known about older Sindhi adults' experience of how they achieve resilience after late-life spousal loss, and what different ways of achieving resilience are used by male and female older persons.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOmega (Westport)
October 2024
Department of Nursing, Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery, Tehran Medical Sciences, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
The death of a spouse, as the most stressful event in old age, can put the older adult at risk of death if they do not adapt again. Since the process of adapting to bereavement occurs in the context of social interactions and is experienced in different ways in different societies, this research was conducted with the aim of explaining the background and factors affecting the adaptation of the older adult to the death of their spouse. The experiences of 21 participants were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed with Lundman and Granheim's conventional content analysis approach, which led to the creation of three main categories1: how one perceives loss; 2:quality of life after the deceased; and 3: the quality of marital life.
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