Widowhood, Socio-Economic Status, Health and Wellbeing in Low and Middle-Income Countries

Abstract

Using data on women aged 50 and over from the WHO’s Survey of Ageing and Adult Health for China, Ghana, India, the Russian Federation and South Africa (N = 17,009), we assess associations between widowhood and socio-economic, health and quality of life deprivations. We find variations in the prevalence and timing of widowhood across the study countries, and associations between widowhood and being in the poorest wealth quintile for all five countries. For other deprivations, national experiences varied, with stronger and more consistent effects for India and China. These findings challenge generalised claims about widowhood and call for more contextualised analysis.

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Corrigendum

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the principal investigators at the SAGE sites: P. Arokiasamy (India); R. Biritwum (Ghana); Wu Fan (China); R. Lopez Riadura (Mexico); T. Maximova (Russian Federation); and N. Phaswanamafuya (South Africa). We would also like to acknowledge useful comments on an earlier draft of this paper provided by Shah Ebrahim.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the World Health Organisation.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Reasons for non-response in the Mexico survey were refusal (40%), failure to locate the respondent (36%), respondent resident elsewhere (18%) and other (6%). No further information is available for the Mexican non-respondent households and so it is not possible to ascertain the extent of potential non-response bias.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Institute of Health (grants OGHA 04034785; YA1323-08-CN-0020; Y1-AG-1005-0 (R01-AG034479), which funded the WHO Study on global AGEing and adult health (SAGE) on which this analysis is based. The analysis was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (grant ES/K003526/1).