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Marital Status, Family Ties, and Self-rated Health Among Elders In South India

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Abstract

This article examines the impact of familial social support ties (indicated by marital status, kin availability, sources of economic support, and frequency and quality of emotional interaction) on subjective health perception among a sample of elderly men and women aged 60 and older in South India. We used 1993 survey data from three states of South India: Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka. We hypothesized that (a) widowhood would be associated with poorer self-rated health, (b) number of kin ties would be positively associated with self-rated health, (c) economic and emotional support from kin would improve outcomes, and (d) these associations would be stronger among women than among men. Results of logistic regression techniques supported the first hypothesis and partially supported the third. With regard to the second hypothesis, the presence of specific kin rather than the number of each type of family member was important. For the fourth hypothesis, results suggest that men and women in this sample have broadly similar associations between widowhood and self-rated health. For women however, controlling for socioeconomic status did not weaken the association between widowhood and self-rated health, suggesting the symbolic/cultural importance of this status. In general, these findings suggest that theories on the importance of marital status and kin ties for older adults’ self-rated health, which were developed and tested in Western societies, need to be refined for Asian societies, where the nature of marriage and widowhood are different.

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Notes

  1. Significant within-region variations exist, however.

  2. Throughout most of India, marriage systems enjoin endogamy of caste and sect, and, in practice, frequently that of region and language.

  3. The measurement of these variables follows widely standardized approaches used in most quantitative, questionnaire-based studies (e.g., the longitudinal Survey of the Health and Living Status of the Elderly in Taiwan, 1989–1996, or the Association of South East Asian Nations sponsored Surveys of the Elderly in Thailand, the Philippines, and Singapore), where self-reports by the study participants form the bases of information. This is an approach that has advantages as well as shortcomings. On the one hand, self-reports by the participant may either reflect socially normative answers or mask underlying complexities. For example, even a comparatively straightforward enumeration of number of persons lived with may not be as clear cut as it appears on the surface. Particularly in rural settings, living alone may sometimes mean merely sleeping and cooking in a separate front room of a house shared by other family members, with additional close kin living just across a narrow street, and with frequent sharing of provisions by all (e.g., as demonstrated by Marulasiddiah, 1969). Variables measuring more complex and dynamic concepts such as quality of kin ties are likely to be fraught with even more ambiguity. However, the advantages of standardized survey methods are also widely known; they include enabling of hypothesis testing through substantial sample size and comparability with other studies. In short, insights from ethnographic studies are complemented by the numerical size and wider focus of survey-based quantitative studies. The results were interpreted with these issues in mind.

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Acknowledgments

This is a revised version of the paper presented at the Population Association of America Annual Meeting, March 25–27, 1999, in New York City. This research was supported by Grant T32 HD07237, “Research Training in Population Statistics” from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The Aging Survey 1993 was supported by the larger ESCAP project on the Elderly in Asia. We thank the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Center on Minority Aging at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for research support. We also thank David Butler Perry for assistance in manuscript preparation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Human Development and Family Studies, University of North Carolina-Greensboro, 228 Stone Building, Greensboro, NC, 27402-6170, USA

    S. Sudha

  2. Department of Biostatistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Chirayath Suchindran

  3. Center for Minority Aging, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Elizabeth J. Mutran

  4. Centre for Development Studies, Trivandrum, Kerala, India

    S. Irudaya Rajan

  5. Achutha Menon Centre, Sree Chitra Thirunal Institute for Health Sciences Research, Trivandrum, Kerala, India

    P. Sankara Sarma

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Sudha, S., Suchindran, C., Mutran, E.J. et al. Marital Status, Family Ties, and Self-rated Health Among Elders In South India. J Cross Cult Gerontol 21, 103–120 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10823-006-9027-x

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