Marital status and well-being: A comparison of widowed, divorced, and married mothers in israel

This paper addresses itself to three main questions: (a) To what extent does single-parenthood enable a quality of life characterized by a sense of personal well-being? (b) What are the main components of well-being for single mothers? (c) Which background factors facilitate well-being in single mothers? In order to answer these questions a Depression Adjective Check-List (Lubin, 1965) was administered to a representative sample of 142 widows and 120 divorcees who had been single for a minimum of four years and who each had at least one minor child. The main findings: (a) measures of well-being were lower for single mothers than for married mothers; (b) there were negative, but also some positive components of well-being: a growing sense of loneliness, of material hardship, of anxiety about parental responsibilities, on the one hand, and a sense of occupational growth, on the other hand; (c) the background factors which affect well-being were properties such as schooling, earnings, and health as well as participation in familial decisions while still married. These results were interpreted in the context of the familistic orientations prevailing in Israeli society.