Mastery and Marital Processes: Mechanisms Linking Midlife Economic Adversity and Later‐Life Loneliness for Husbands and Wives in Enduring Marriages

Abstract

Research has documented that loneliness is a major public health concern, particularly for older adults in the United States. However, previous studies have not elucidated the mechanisms that connect family economic adversity to husbands’ and wives’ loneliness in later adulthood. Thus, using prospective dyadic data over 27 years from 254 enduring couples, the present study investigated how spouses’ mastery, as an intraindividual process, and marital functioning, as a couple process, link midlife family economic adversity to spouses’ later‐life loneliness. The results provided support for three linking life course pathways: an adversity‐mastery‐loneliness pathway, an adversity‐marital functioning‐loneliness pathway, and a mastery‐marital functioning‐loneliness pathway. The results also showed spousal contemporaneous dependencies in mastery and loneliness. These findings demonstrate the persistent influence of midlife family economic adversity on husbands’ and wives’ loneliness nearly three decades later and elucidate linking mechanisms involving mastery and couple marital functioning. Findings are discussed as they relate to life course and family systems theories. Implications address multiple levels including national‐ and state‐policies and couple‐level clinical interventions.

Midlife family financial strain, sense of control and pain in later years: An investigation of rural husbands and wives

“…Furthermore, the life course stress process perspective posits that 'the hardships and stressors most inimical to mastery are, first, those that are stubbornly persistent despite efforts to avoid or ameliorate them; and, second, those that are located within the most salient areas of life' (Pearlin et al, 2007, p. 166). Consequently, because financial problems are highly salient for middle-aged parents, and these problems often continue over an extended period of time, both husbands' and wives' FFS is expected to be strongly associated with a decline in sense of control during the middle years (Lachman & Weaver, 1998;Wickrama & O'Neal, 2020). Depletion of husbands' and wives' sense of control may be attributed to several psycho-social mechanism.…”

“…As depicted in Figure 1, drawing from the life course stress process perspective (Pearlin et al., 2005; Turner, 2010), we expect that the long‐term FFS‐pain association may partly operate through the depletion of individuals' sense of control or mastery. Sense of control has increasingly been recognized as an important psychological resource that is associated with behavioural and health outcomes (Pressman & Cohen, 2005; Wickrama & O'Neal, 2020). Indeed, a number of studies suggest that individual psychological resources, including sense of control, consist of two distinct components.…”

“…Because spouses' lives are linked across the life course (Elder, 1998), there may be dependencies between husbands and wives in attributes in the current study (i.e., FFS, sense of control, physical pain), creating various husband‐wife associations. Past research has provided evidence for such husband‐wife contemporaneous associations with respect to control beliefs (Wickrama & O'Neal, 2020) and health outcomes (Wickrama & O'Neal, 2020). These dependencies may bias parameters in separate husband and wife analyses (Kenny, Kasthy & Cook, 2006).…”

Midlife Marital and Financial Stress and the Progression of Later-Life Health Problems for Husbands and Wives

“…In particular, research has shown that persistent family financial stress depletes individuals' resources, including their sense of self-worth and mastery (Pearlin et al, 2007). Recent studies have shown that the depletion of these resources contributes to experiences of bodily pain (Chou et al, 2016) and loneliness in later years (Wickrama & O'Neal, 2020).…”