Start Date
16-10-2009 11:00 AM
End Date
16-10-2009 12:30 PM
Description
Married people live longer than those who remain single both in Canada and the USA, with men showing the most gain from marriage. The benefit to marriage has been exlpicated in four different ways: marital benefits, with protective benefits going mostly to men; negative selection, with sicker individuals seeking healthcare from their spouses in a health-poor policy environment; clean-up for marriage, whereby mostly male risky behaviors are left behind prior to marriage; and positive selection, suggesting instead that the marital selection process is tied to health indicators evident in social circumstances. The importance of social policy to these realms is clear: not only do important healthcare differences define how health is cared for in each country, but maternal and childcare policies differ significantly in the burden placed on the family and thus often the mothers to cope with the double burden of work and childrearing. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics in the USA, and the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics in Canada, this paper explicitly tests the relationship between marriage onset, marital selection in the years leading to marriage, and social causation in the years following marriage in a comparative context between Canada and the USA in order to understand the intersection between policy context, and gender relations within the family, and what impact these have on population health. Preliminary findings show that marital selection among men is more imporrtant in the USA than in Canada, and that the period after marriage is often followed by temporary health shocks for women in the USA but not in Canada. Policy implications are considered.
Sean Clouston did his undergraduate work at the University of Victoria, and is working on his PhD at McGill University. Last year, he spent the years as a Fulbright Scholar at the Mailman School of Public Health in New York. His work focuses broadly on social inequalities and health, taking a lifecourse perspective on the ways that individuals proceed through their lives while trying to understand how public policy interacts with everyday life to create unequal circumstances and inequities in health outcomes. Sean is part of the International Research Infrastructure on Social Inequalities in Health (IRIS) at McGill University and the Center for the Study of Social Inequalities and Health at Columbia University.
Amélie Quesnel-Vallée, PhD, is Assistant Professor at McGill University, where she holds an Arts and Medicine cross-faculty appointment in the Departments of Sociology and of Epidemiology. She also heads the International Research Infrastructure on Social inequalities in health (IRIS), funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation Leaders Opportunity Fund. In 2005, she received the American Sociological Association Dissertation Award for her Fulbright-funded doctoral research. She currently studies the impact of public policies on health inequalities in 21 OECD countries. Her work recently appeared in a book she co-edited, Le privé dans la santé : Les discours et les faits (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2008.
Included in
Public Policy, Gender, Marriage, and Self-Rated Health
Married people live longer than those who remain single both in Canada and the USA, with men showing the most gain from marriage. The benefit to marriage has been exlpicated in four different ways: marital benefits, with protective benefits going mostly to men; negative selection, with sicker individuals seeking healthcare from their spouses in a health-poor policy environment; clean-up for marriage, whereby mostly male risky behaviors are left behind prior to marriage; and positive selection, suggesting instead that the marital selection process is tied to health indicators evident in social circumstances. The importance of social policy to these realms is clear: not only do important healthcare differences define how health is cared for in each country, but maternal and childcare policies differ significantly in the burden placed on the family and thus often the mothers to cope with the double burden of work and childrearing. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics in the USA, and the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics in Canada, this paper explicitly tests the relationship between marriage onset, marital selection in the years leading to marriage, and social causation in the years following marriage in a comparative context between Canada and the USA in order to understand the intersection between policy context, and gender relations within the family, and what impact these have on population health. Preliminary findings show that marital selection among men is more imporrtant in the USA than in Canada, and that the period after marriage is often followed by temporary health shocks for women in the USA but not in Canada. Policy implications are considered.
Sean Clouston did his undergraduate work at the University of Victoria, and is working on his PhD at McGill University. Last year, he spent the years as a Fulbright Scholar at the Mailman School of Public Health in New York. His work focuses broadly on social inequalities and health, taking a lifecourse perspective on the ways that individuals proceed through their lives while trying to understand how public policy interacts with everyday life to create unequal circumstances and inequities in health outcomes. Sean is part of the International Research Infrastructure on Social Inequalities in Health (IRIS) at McGill University and the Center for the Study of Social Inequalities and Health at Columbia University.
Amélie Quesnel-Vallée, PhD, is Assistant Professor at McGill University, where she holds an Arts and Medicine cross-faculty appointment in the Departments of Sociology and of Epidemiology. She also heads the International Research Infrastructure on Social inequalities in health (IRIS), funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation Leaders Opportunity Fund. In 2005, she received the American Sociological Association Dissertation Award for her Fulbright-funded doctoral research. She currently studies the impact of public policies on health inequalities in 21 OECD countries. Her work recently appeared in a book she co-edited, Le privé dans la santé : Les discours et les faits (Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 2008.