Research over the years has shown that the higher the level of education a person has, the better their overall health, including fewer chronic diseases, healthier aging, and longer lifespan.
Why can education be closely linked to health? Theoretically, education can enable individuals to gain broader cognition, richer resources, and more flexible skills, and can translate into better health outcomes through a series of variables. The field of medical sociology typically identifies education as a “fundamental mechanism,” serving as an upstream factor that lays the foundation for individuals’ subsequent health outcomes.
But when a person has a partner, does the partner’s level of education affect their health?
Recently, a study published in the “Journal of Health and Social Behavior” by researchers from Indiana University in the United States found that the level of education of a spouse is positively correlated with an individual’s overall health status, to a degree comparable to the impact of one’s own education level. This study indicates that your partner’s level of education is very important for your health. Therefore, education is not only valuable for individuals but also serves as a shareable health resource.
Actually, the view that partner resources are crucial for individual health has received widespread support. In the rapidly growing interdisciplinary literature, the level of education of a partner has been linked to self-rated health, life expectancy, cancer survival rates, coronary heart disease, myocardial infarction, hypertension, obesity, smoking, excessive drinking, unhealthy eating habits, and decline in cognitive ability. In all these studies, compared to those with less educated partners, individuals with partners with higher education levels tend to have better health outcomes, or they adhere to healthier lifestyles, such as lower rates of coronary heart disease or lower risk of heart attacks, being less likely to smoke and have unhealthy dietary habits.
While researchers believe that there is a causal relationship between a partner’s level of education and individual health, there is a lack of necessary data to prove this relationship.
In this study, researchers used data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) which spans 54 years, covering rich information on participants’ health, marriage, education levels, and their spouses’ education levels. Since the WLS study began in 1957, it only involves heterosexual couples.
The researchers also compared the self-rated health of participants’ siblings with different levels of education of their spouses, attempting to analyze whether the differences in partners’ education levels could explain the differences in individual health status by using rich longitudinal data spanning decades and providing additional data modeling for unobserved heterogeneity.
They found that in later adulthood, there is a positive and substantial relationship between a spouse’s education level and one’s own health, which persists even after adjusting for individuals’ own education level and various pre-marital characteristics (including cognitive abilities, individual health, and pre-marital health behaviors). This suggests that the way participants benefit from having a partner with a higher education level is generally similar to the way they benefit from having a higher education level themselves.
The researchers also found that this situation is more pronounced in female participants, whose health is more closely related to the education level of their spouses compared to males. This relationship holds even after adjusting for many health-related variables predicting marriage formation.
The researchers suggest that this is the most compelling evidence to date of causality and reciprocal influence on health between married couples, demonstrating the benefits of education for individuals’ health promotion, as well as tangible benefits for those around them, especially in intimate relationships.
The first author of the study, Associate Professor Andrew Halpern-Manners of the Department of Sociology at Indiana University, said, “This highlights the importance of education as a worthwhile investment in the public good, and indicates that its impact on overall public health may be greater than we usually think.”
Link to the paper:
https://doi.org/10.1177/00221465211063879
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Source: Chinese Biotechnology Network
Editor: BioOnline
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