Vida Maralani
Associate Professor of Sociology, Cornell University
Background: A robust existing literature documents how individual-level characteristics such as education, income, and health behaviors shape health outcomes. But people also draw on family-level resources to secure better health, especially the resources of their spouses. A couple’s shared portfolio of resources is shaped both by each spouse’s individual characteristics and by how couples sort systematically on these characteristics in marriage markets. This multidimensional matching process can accumulate resources across distinct domains of well-being (e.g., education and health behaviors) at the couple level, which can then pay off across the life course for all family members. This study uses Health and Retirement Study data to construct a couple-level longitudinal dataset with information on the education and health behaviors of spouses at the time of marriage and across the marital years to examine how marital sorting is associated with couples’ health outcomes from ages 50 to 70.
Aim 1: To investigate how couples’ joint education- smoking portfolios established at the time of marriage inform their functional limitations at older ages.
Aim 2: To examine differences in smoking and exposure to second-hand smoke across the marital years as potential mechanisms linking assortative mating to inequalities in functional limitations at older ages.
Aim 3: To examine whether the association between assortative mating and health at older ages has changed across birth cohorts. This helps to illuminate one potential family-level mechanism underlying increasing educational disparities in health in the U.S.