Marital Status and Well-Being in Canada

Abstract

Previous studies suggest that there is a causal relationship between a person's marital status and well-being. An alternative to the causal perspective is that the relationship is due to selection. One hypothesis in regard to selection of happy and healthy people into marriage is that young and old age groups would be similar on well-being measures. Two subjective measures, life satisfaction and subjective health assessments, and two objective measures, actual health problems and number of consultations with physicians in the last year, measure well-being for a sample of 11,131 Canadians. Findings suggest that, overall, single persons are healthier than married and that the causal hypothesis is supported only for subjective life satisfaction scores. However, even this finding fails to suggest the causal relationship because age group variations in the relationship between life satisfaction and marital status fits well with the pattern predicted by the selection hypothesis. These findings suggest that the view that marriage is causally related to well-being in Canada is doubtful.