The ambivalent marriage takes a toll on health | Hacker News Reader

The ambivalent marriage takes a toll on health

well.blogs.nytimes.com

38 pointszabramow17 comments

IMHO as a married person, this is a fantastic area for research! The basic concept makes intuitive sense and I'm inclined to believe that feeling very positively about one's marriage is better for a person's health then feeling ambivalent about the relationship.

However, with a sample size of only 94, I'm skeptical that this study is representative of US marriages at large. I'm also skeptical that it is possible to control for the influence of age and generational effects given that the couples have been married from 1 to 41 years in such a small study.

While interesting and important as a research topic, this really feels like it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Why are you skeptical due to the sample size of 94? The sample size only needs to be large enough to capture the variance in the response for the population. The sample size does not need to increase as the population being studied increases. Look into the concept of statistical power.

I think the original commentor's skepticism, while possibly too concerned with sample size, is still valid. This study is trying to draw connections between two large and hard to understand systems, marriage and cardiovascular health. While the sample size may have captured enough variance in a certain population to generalize the results I doubt they can be generalized world wide, nation wide, state wide or possibly even city wide.

For example, how did they find these participants? Did the researchers just pull married couples from the BYU campus or from across the city? Given BYU and Utah's population are they mostly LDS couples? What about their race given that the LDS is significantly more caucasian than the US overall? What about diet given that LDS members generally don't consume alcohol or caffeinated beverages? What about geography? Perhaps temperature or altitude affected the cardiovascular markers or measurements were taken under different conditions for different groups?

All of the above things I've mentioned may or may not affect cardiovascular health, and I doubt they captured or had the time and resources to control for all these factors and any additional ones I didn't bring up. So I think being skeptical is okay. Until this study has been reproduced multiple times or we understand the entire pathway connecting marriage and heart health (a highly unlikely occurrence) I will remain skeptical because that's how good science works.

Ah yeah, it definitely cannot be generalized to US marriages at large due to the sample only being from a limited area. Confounding factors may definitely be an issue as well.

This is only true if you know that you are sampling from the underlying population fairly, and you can't conclude that from just looking at the sample variance unless you know the distribution you are sampling from.

> The sample size only needs to be large enough to capture the variance in the response for the population.

And you need a representative sample to capture the variance of a population. The smaller the sample, the less likely you will be in capturing the actual variance.

Yes, but over sampling (over powering) a study causes issues as well due to increasing the chance of Type I Error (i.e. detecting false positives).

I agree and that's not really what I'm saying.

I think if you want to generalize (which is very rarely done in science) then the sample size has to be representative of your (general) population.

Now we know that media (i.e. NYT) likes to take the extreme specificity that makes studies significant and apply it broadly. That's really where my contention comes from.

This mirrors some of the findings of Dr. John M. Gottman, who studied conflict in married couples and found that having your significant other hold you in disgust is so stressful that it can have a negative effect on your immune system.

Was this the same research that showed that one of the biggest predictors for divorce was whether your partner held you in contempt? I recall reading that that was a bigger problem for marriages than things like outright hostility or infidelity, but I could be remembering things completely wrong.

Yes: "Gottman's theory states that there are four major emotional reactions that are destructive and thus are the four predictors to a divorce: criticism, defensiveness, stonewalling, and contempt. Among these four, Gottman considers contempt the most important of them all."

Since I'm no sociologist, how do these researchers go about determining whether correlation = causation? I myself would tend to come to the opposite conclusion, that healthy motivated people with good vitals are more likely to put more effort into their marriage, because being healthy just makes you feel better in general. I've been married for 10 years, 2 kids, and I look forward to seeing my sexy wife because she makes an effort to keep herself looking good, and I put in the same effort. I think having the good vitals mentioned in this article improves your outlook on every aspect of life, but of course it's just one factor coming into play with money, time, other relationships, etc.

> Subjects used a palm pilot to record exactly what they were doing at the moment the blood pressure was taken — eating, working, resting, interacting with their spouse.

A palm pilot?

Edit: What? That isn't interesting? It would be funny if business people were modding me down.

It was probably a very cheap device they could give out to the people in the study.

Haha, coming across 'palm pilot' gave me pause and made me scroll up to double check the publish date.

>It is also not clear if the high blood pressure findings shown in the study would eventually lead to poorer health over time.

So in the article headline they state that the ambivalent marriage takes a toll on health, but in the article itself they clearly contradict this and state they are not sure whether this is even true (see above quote). I think AB-testing pointed out that the masses are becoming aware of Betteridge's law and online media now show more caution when publishing headlines with question marks at the end.

It's not unlikely that a few months ago, this article would have been published as "Does the ambivalent marriage take a toll on health?". At least then it would have been clear from the get-go that this is linkbait.

Thank you for reminding me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline... . I knew this was a thing, but I forgot the name of it.

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