IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v37y1993i8p1005-1010.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The impact of a child death on marital adjustment

Author

Listed:
  • Najman, Jake M.
  • Vance, John C.
  • Boyle, Fran
  • Embleton, Gary
  • Foster, Bill
  • Thearle, John

Abstract

One continuing concern in the sociological and psychological literature has been with the mental health consequences of stressful life events. Occasionally such stressful events have been linked to other outcomes such as deterioration in the extent or quality of the relationship between a cohabiting (usually married) couple. This paper takes data from a longitudinal study of parents of an infant who has died (due to a Stillbirth, Neonatal Death or Sudden Infant Death), to determine whether the relationship between the parents is adversely affected. The follow-up data is available 2 months and 6-8 months after the infant death. The results indicate there is an increased marital break-up rate for parents whose infant has died. Further, shortly after the death there is evidence of a deterioration of the quality of the marital relationship between the partners whose relationship has remained intact. Both these consequences of an infant death are unlikely to be due to chance, but their magnitude is relatively modest. At the 6 month follow-up, there is evidence of a deterioration in the quality of the relationship for those partners whose infant survived, such that at 6 months there are no longer any marital adjustment differences between parents experiencing an infant death and parents whose infant survived.

Suggested Citation

  • Najman, Jake M. & Vance, John C. & Boyle, Fran & Embleton, Gary & Foster, Bill & Thearle, John, 1993. "The impact of a child death on marital adjustment," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 37(8), pages 1005-1010, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:37:y:1993:i:8:p:1005-1010
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0277-9536(93)90435-7
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hilde-Kristin Vegsund & Toril Rannestad & Trude Reinfjell & Unni Karin Moksnes & Alexandra Eilegård Wallin & Mary-Elizabeth Bradley Eilertsen, 2018. "Translation and Linguistic Validation of a Swedish Study-Specific Questionnaire for Use among Norwegian Parents Who Lost a Child to Cancer," Social Sciences, MDPI, vol. 7(10), pages 1-18, October.
    2. Gerard J. Berg & Petter Lundborg & Johan Vikström, 2017. "The Economics of Grief," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 127(604), pages 1794-1832, September.
    3. Cayetano Fernández-Sola & Marcos Camacho-Ávila & José Manuel Hernández-Padilla & Isabel María Fernández-Medina & Francisca Rosa Jiménez-López & Encarnación Hernández-Sánchez & María Belén Conesa-Ferre, 2020. "Impact of Perinatal Death on the Social and Family Context of the Parents," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 17(10), pages 1-18, May.
    4. Lee, Chioun & Glei, Dana A. & Weinstein, Maxine & Goldman, Noreen, 2014. "Death of a child and parental wellbeing in old age: Evidence from Taiwan," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 101(C), pages 166-173.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:37:y:1993:i:8:p:1005-1010. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.