Higher education brings more positive health effects on their partners?

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Higher education brings more positive health effects on their partners?

JHSB: Who you are with is important! Higher education levels were associated with more positive health effects on their partners

Recently, researchers from Indiana University gave the answer that spouse education is positively related to your overall health, and its impact is comparable to the impact of your own education. The findings were published in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

For the study, researchers used data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a multidimensional longitudinal study of individuals, their spouses, their siblings, and siblings’ spouses, spanning more than half a century, Include information about respondents’ health, marriage, education, and their spouse’s education.

However, the relationship between spousal education and overall health is difficult to characterize because healthier people tend to be more educated and work with those with higher education, so it is difficult to isolate the unique effects of their spouse’s education .

To address this question, the team compared the health of siblings whose spouses differed in their educational attainment.

The idea, say the researchers, is to find people who are as similar as possible in every way, and then ask them about differences in their partners’ education to explain health differences.

The researchers found that partners with higher education also had a positive impact on their overall health.

Notably, this pattern was particularly pronounced in women, whose health was more closely related to spouse education than in men.

The findings likely reflect the time period (1960s-1970s) when most respondents completed their education, married and entered the workforce, the researchers said.

At the same time, the researchers observed that this phenomenon has a clear crossover effect, meaning that education has health-enhancing benefits for oneself and tangible benefits for those around them, especially intimacy.

To sum up, people often say that “things gather together, people are divided into groups”, whether it is choosing a mate or choosing a friend, they may be more inclined to people who are similar to themselves in various aspects, such as living habits and values. The research underscores the importance of education, perhaps even more so than we usually think.

References:

Andrew Halpern-Manners et al, Crossover Effects of Education on Health within Married Couples, Journal of Health and Social Behavior (2022). DOI: 10.1177/00221465211063879