This paper analyses the impact of spousal care-giving on survivors’ depressive symptoms six months into widowhood, and examines the applicability of a ‘relief model ’ of spousal adjustment during bereavement. We examine several aspects of the care-giving situation, including care-giver stress, care-giving demands, and type and duration of care and how these affect survivors’ depressive symptoma...

Beca se the life expectancy of women is longer than that of men and becatitse men seem to marry younger women, most of the literature on caregivers of the elderly has focusd on women who care for elderly, disabled husbands,. Im order to explore the role of men as caretakers of disabled wives, '25 elderly widowers (aged 63-93) participated in interviews designed to elicit recollections of'the ti...

OBJECTIVES Despite the large body of literature on bereavement, little is known about the impact of sociohistorical context on individual reactions to spousal loss. This study examines the effect of marital status, time period and gender on physical and mental health, and whether reported difficulties following spousal loss differ at 2 distinctive time periods. METHOD Two cohorts of older ber...

OBJECTIVES Transitions into and out of marriage are becoming more commonplace among persons in middle and later life. We assess the extent to which parental marital transitions influence inter vivos financial transfers to adult children at the family level. METHODS Panel data from 6,017 households with adult children in the 1992-1998 waves of the Health and Retirement Study are analyzed in th...

OBJECTIVE This study investigates the association between bereavement and the mortality of a surviving spouse among Amish couples. We hypothesised that the bereavement effect would be relatively small in the Amish due to the unusually cohesive social structure of the Amish that might attenuate the loss of spousal support. DESIGN Population-based cohort study. SETTING The USA. PARTICIPANTS...

Although the Swedish Adoption Twin of Aging (SATSA) has been used to investigate phenotypic stability of late life depressive symptoms, the biometric processes underlying this stability have not been studied. Under a reciprocal effects modeling framework, we used SATSA twins' Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) Scale data across 5 waves (from 1987-2007) to test whether the recip...