Divorce and Diagnosis: The Role of the Marital History for Illness after Divorce in Germany

Michaela Kreyenfeld , Hertie School of Governance
Daniel Brüggmann, Hertie School, Berlin
Martin Brünger , Charité Berlin
Paul Gellert, Charité Berlin

There is strong public and scholarly interest in in how divorce and separation impact men, women as well as children’s well-being. A large body of sociological research has amassed on this topic which has shown that divorce strongly affects subjective measures of health and well-being. However, only few studies have differentiated between different types of health outcomes. If the outcome was distinguished, the focus has largely been on mental health, measured over scales of depression and mental wellbeing. Only few studies have examined other outcomes, such as cardiovascular diseases. It is mainly in the area of medical research that scholars have casted a more nuanced light on the impact of divorce on health outcomes by differentiating how divorce affects the types of diseases or the length of recovery from an illness. While medical research has, thus, adopted a more fine-grained approach to health outcomes, ‘divorce’ was treated in an often simplified manner in these studies. Differences by age at divorce, the duration since divorce or the duration of marriage were not accounted for in these medical investigations. With our project, we seek to bridge the medical and sociological strands of literature by examining how the marital history impacts health outcomes of divorcees in Germany. We investigate how the age at marriage, the duration of marriage as well as the ‘earner model’ during marriage impact the ‘type of diagnosis’ and whether the effect differs by gender.

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 Presented in Session P1. Postercafe