Leisure Activity and Depressive Symptoms of Widowed and Married Women in Later Life

Abstract

Relatively little evidence is available about how leisure involvement changes with spousal loss, and even less about how leisure activity is associated with the well-being of widows during this transition. Using data from the Americans Changing Lives (ACL) dataset, this study compared 148 widows with an equal number of continuously married women to investigate change in leisure involvement during the transition to widowhood and examine the relationship between leisure and depressive symptoms among the older women. Findings indicated that widows benefited from increased involvement in some activities while this was not necessarily the case for married women. This suggests that change in widows' leisure involvement may be related more to bereavement than to other aging-related changes such as health and disability.

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