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Notes -
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-happier-without-children-or-a-spouse-happiness-expert
Standard caveat re replication crisis, bad science reporting, etc.
Sorry, but it's one study cherry-picked by the Guardian that just so happens to fit their political bias and serves as good clickbait fodder.
The article even implicitly admits if flirs in the face of most research.
I'm sure it could. Almost sounds like there's benefits to being married.
Also I would add that 'happiness' is a fleeting and imprecise measure in my opinion. I think modern society puts far too much emphasis on hedonia rather than eudaimonia.
This doesn't fill me with confidence.
To add to your objections: I've read this Guardian article before and it is citing Paul Dolan, who has made claims that have already been extensively debunked elsewhere. Even Vox, one of the most left-leaning outlets available, called it out as misinformation. You are pretty much correct to doubt the entirety of the article.
I want to first deal with the portions of the Guardian article that were stripped out just as an exhibition of the quality of research you can expect from Dolan. The offending sections are: "Married people are happier than other population subgroups, but only when their spouse is in the room when they’re asked how happy they are. When the spouse is not present: fucking miserable." And: "The study found that levels of happiness reported by those who were married was higher than the unmarried, but only when their spouse was in the room; unmarried individuals reported lower levels of misery than married individuals who were asked when their spouse was not present." You can see both of these claims made in an archive of the page on 25 May 2019 here.
There are a few reasons why this claim is bad, but the main thing which destroyed his argument was pointed out by economist Gray Kimbrough, who noticed that the source which Dolan was drawing from actually does not actually include any of this information. The error Dolan made was to interpret the categories "Married - spouse present" as "spouse is in the room" and "Married - spouse absent" as "spouse is not in the room". In reality, what "spouse absent" refers to is married people whose partner is not living in their household. So even assuming that the difference is statistically significant (despite the fact that no such statistical analysis is conducted), all Dolan actually found was that married people whose spouses don't live with them are unhappier than married people whose spouses live with them. What's even funnier is that the data also shows slightly higher levels of happiness in the "married, spouse not present" category than for the never married or divorced categories, which casts even further doubt on his claim. This is an honestly astonishing error that should have never been made, and it casts quite a bit of doubt on Dolan's competency.
When Dolan was made aware of this, he retracted the statement, and so did the media outlets that published it (like the Guardian). However, the other claims made in the Guardian that weren't retracted are just about as tendentious and questionable, as Kimbrough notes in a follow-up thread. He got a copy of Dolan's book, and looked through it to see his sources. And the errors are truly legion.
To start, the claim that still appears in the current version of the Guardian article that married women die sooner than if they never married apparently is not supported at all in Dolan's book. Furthermore, the idea in the article that women's health is "unaffected" by marriage (which already contradicts the idea that women die sooner) is also not supported. In the book, Dolan cites articles claiming that they prove that there "really do not appear to be any health-related reasons to marry if you are a woman", but Kimbrough demonstrates that the sources he uses do not actually support this claim - they cite other studies stating that the health benefits that accrue to women from marriage are less than those that accrue to men, but they do not support the idea that marriage is void of health benefits for women. Furthermore, there are abundant reasons to doubt this weaker claim that marriage benefits men's health more than women's health, but I'll get to that later.
Next, Kimbrough attacks the claim that the healthiest and happiest population subgroup are women who never married or had children. He states: "The ATUS lacks data on ever having children, but I can compare never/ever married with and without children in the household. This doesn’t back up his claim." As evidence, he posts a table that features ATUS data. This table presents mean happiness broken down by sex, marital status and childlessness (a 0-6 scale is used here). Never married men without kids have a score of 4.1, never married men with kids have a score of 4.2, and married men, kids or without, have a score of 4.3. Never married women without kids have a score of 4.2, and every other category of women (never married women with kids, as well as married women, kids or without) has a score of 4.4. Kimbrough then posts more ATUS data displaying happiness over the life course by gender and marital status, which shows that if anything married men and women both are slightly more happy than their unmarried counterparts, and that married men and women's "happiness levels" look fairly similar. He concludes that "[T]here does not appear to be evidence supporting any of the dramatic claims in the press. While one has been retracted, I believe that all of them should be retracted and corrected."
That's Kimbrough's criticism covered. Now, to tackle the weaker claim that "the health benefits of marriage unequally accrue to men and women", I'd like to note that the findings on that certainly do not all point in one direction, and furthermore there are often problems when trying to establish causation here. Is it that marriage grants benefits to health, or is it the case that people with good health are more likely to get married? Could the difference found between men and women be partially explained by a selection effect? Trying to prove causation is not a trivial task, and in order to actually assess this, you'd ideally need longitudinal data. Many of the studies about the health effects of marriage are simply not methodologically suited to prove that the improved health is caused by marriage alone.
For example, I have tracked down one of the studies shown in Kimbrough's screenshot of the articles which Dolan cites, the ones that try to argue that men get more health benefits from marriage than women. The study in question I've looked at is Litwak and Messeri (1989), which uses "information on age, gender, race, and marital status of decedents 25 years or older at time of death who died from one of the 176 rated causes in 1980".
The authors attempt to estimate the effect of marital status on mortality, stating "Effects of social supports were estimated from ratios of single to married mortality rates for each rated cause of death broken down by age-gender-race groupings of decedents. ... Denominators for the mortality rates were based on 1980 United States census counts for single and married persons in each of the corresponding age-by-gender-by-race sub-groups. Mortality ratios greater than 1 indicate that marriage conferred protection. Ratios about 1 indicate that marriage confers little benefit, while ratios less than one indicate that married individuals were more likely to die from a specific cause." They find ratios greater than 1 for both men and women, indicating mortality is lower among married men and women. They also find that mortality ratios are higher for men.
Now, this doesn't seem like a particularly compelling methodology. If you are just seeing how the mortality rates for a given year differ between the married and unmarried, it seems clear to me that this methodology does not really allow you to distinguish between an actual effect of marriage on mortality vs. selection effects. The authors also do acknowledge this limitation, stating that "Other problems with these data are the lack of a measure of health status and limited socioeconomic measures. Thus our data may reflect a spurious effect of an unmeasured antecedent cause such as poor health. Poor health might lessen chances of marriage and increase mortality at the same time". While I would say it's likely that marriage does have some genuine effect, the difficulty of distinguishing between the two means that their conclusion (that the mortality-reducing benefits of marriage are greater for men than women) ends up being suspect. And while the authors note that some studies controlling for health status do still find an effect of marital status on mortality, this runs into the opposite problem that you might then be factoring out legitimate health effects of marriage which then have an impact on mortality. Isolating the effect of marriage using this data isn’t easy.
As an aside, even if I assume that the health benefits of marriage are greater for men than for women, this might not be because marriage privileges men, but because men are less likely to be able to find social supports outside of the marital unit and thus depend more on the social supports offered by marriage. In other words, it need not be reflective of married male privilege, instead it could be showing unmarried male disadvantage. Divorces being mostly instigated by women might not be because marriage is bad for them, but because they are less emotionally dependent on it and are thus less committed to the union. Also, being less invested offers you superior negotiating power. So even if we agree on that finding, there need not necessarily be agreement on what it implies.
There's so much more I could be writing about this, but in short, this Guardian article is terrible.
EDIT: added more
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