A new study co-authored by Yale sociologist Emma Zang reveals stark racial, ethnic, and sex disparities in the marital status and living arrangements of older adults in the United States.

Using a novel analytical method, Zang and her co-authors estimated the number of years past the age of 50 that people spend in different marital and living arrangements, and how the durations of these circumstances differ by race, ethnicity, and sex.

The researchers found that white older adults largely follow traditional patterns of stable marriage and spousal co-residence while Black older adults on average spend a longer time unmarried and living alone or with non-spousal family members. Hispanic older adults on average occupy a middle ground, maintaining marriages for a substantial number of years but also spending extended periods of time living in multi-generational households, according to the study.

The study also showed that these patterns are deeply stratified by sex, with minority women experiencing significantly fewer years married and living with a spouse than men, leaving them more reliant on the support of their relatives.

“Marriage and living arrangements in later life look very different across racial and ethnic groups,” said Zang, associate professor of sociology, biostatistics, and global affairs in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, and the study’s senior author. “These disparities are important because later-life living situations shape people’s social and financial security, and policies intended to support older Americans are often structured around traditional assumptions about marriage that most closely fit the experiences of white Americans.”

The study is published in the journal Demography. Zoey Wang, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan, is the lead author.

For the study, the researchers analyzed data from the Health and Retirement Study (1992-2018), a national survey that tracked the health, finances, and life circumstances of about 20,000 people over age 50 as they moved through life.

While prior research in this area has focused on people’s marital and living circumstances at a fixed point in time, for the new study the researchers used an innovative methodology that allowed them to accurately estimate how many years people spend in different living arrangements. The methodology also allowed them to make valid comparisons between the sexes and across different racial and ethnic groups.
“Our findings show that later-life family structures in the United States are far more unequal than traditional narratives suggest,” Wang said. “Because many social policies are built around the assumption of stable, long-term marriage, they often fail to protect older adults — especially minority women — whose life courses follow very different family trajectories.”

The analysis revealed that older white adults were expected to spend the most years married: about 25.5 years for men and about 18 years for women. Hispanic men and women followed closely behind, with about 23.4 and 15.5 expected years of marriage, respectively. Black men and women had the shortest expected durations of married life: about 17.6 years for men and 9.7 years for women.

The gaps between whites and Hispanics and whites and Blacks are explained by longer expected times living while divorced, the researchers explained. For example, Black women were expected to spend about 12.6 years divorced, compared to 7.3 years for white women.

The study found that white adults spent the highest share of their later years living with a spouse (about 81.4% for men, 52.5% for women), followed by Hispanics (78% for men, 43.2% for women), and then Blacks (67% for men, 28.2% for women). Black adults, especially women, spent the highest proportion of their lives alone (about 19.9% for men, 36% for women).

Across all groups, women were expected to spend more years widowed, divorced, or living with family, the researchers said. These trends were especially pronounced for Black women, who were expected to spend the fewest years married or living with a spouse and the most years divorced, never married, or living alone. This, researchers say, reflects the cumulative social and health disadvantages Black Americans experience over the course of their lives, such as high incarceration rates and lower life expectancy for Black men.

The study also showed that Hispanic older adults have a distinct trajectory marked by modestly fewer years of marriage than whites but more years living with extended family, suggesting both strong norms of family support and economic pressures that make shared households more common, the researchers said.

The disparities uncovered in this study have important implications on social support and caregiving later in life, and can lead to economic insecurity for disadvantaged groups, the researchers said. They also point out that government programs that aim to support older Americans are structured to favor traditional marriages. For example, people must be married for at least 10 years under current rules to be eligible to collect Social Security spousal benefits.

“Policy designs that favor long marriages can exacerbate inequality for groups whose marriages tend to be shorter,” Zang said. “In the case of Social Security spousal benefits, Black women are being systematically excluded from an important form of old-age protection.”

The paper was co-authored by Xuezhixing Zhang of Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore.