It is known that Muslim women in Nigeria have significantly worse nutritional status than their Christian counterparts. The paper first shows this difference explained by covariates including geographic location, ethnicity, household wealth, and women?s education. However, on accounting for observable characteristics, widows enjoy a higher widows, particularly rural areas. patterns are robust t...

I examine how preloss emotional and instrumental dependence on one’s spouse affects older adults’ psychological adjustment to widowhood. Analyses are based on 297 persons from the Changing Lives of Older Couples (CLOC) study, a prospective study of widowhood among adults aged 65 and older. Women who were most emotionally dependent on their spouses had the poorest self-esteem while still married...

Most studies of widowhood have focused on reactions during the first few years postloss. The authors investigated whether widowhood had more enduring effects using a nationally representative U.S. sample. Participants were 768 individuals who had lost their spouse (from a few months to 64 years) prior to data collection. Results indicated that the widowed continued to talk, think, and feel emot...

A major concern of workers, even those financially prepared for retirement, is that a small risk of poverty may grow over time. Cross-sectional data showing that older cohorts have higher poverty rates substantiate this concern. Using data from the Retirement History Study, we analyze changes in the hazard of entering poverty as a cohort of elderly couples retire and age and the wives are widow...

We used a nationally representative panel of Australian households to replicate a study by Yap et al. (2012) that evaluated how life satisfaction changed following major life events and the extent to which personality moderated those changes. We replicated the protective function of marriage but found that long-term declines that follow widowhood mostly reflect normative changes. In addition, w...

This study examines differences between Blacks and Whites in the effect of widowhood on depressive symptoms and anxiety; in grief symptoms six months after spousal loss; and the extent to which these differences are explained by marital quality, social support from children and friends, and religiosity. Analyses are based on the Changing Lives of Older Couples, a prospective study of 1,532 marr...

Death of a spouse is associated with increased mortality risk for the surviving partner (the widowhood effect). We investigated whether the effect magnitude varied between urban, rural and intermediate areas, assembling death records (2001-2009) for a prospective cohort of 296,125 married couples in Northern Ireland. The effect was greatest during the first six months of widowhood in all areas ...