In line with a examine by Indiana College researchers, the reply is sure.

The examine, printed within the Journal of Well being and Social Conduct, discovered that spousal training is positively associated to folks’s general well being, with an impact dimension that rivals the impression of an individual’s personal training.

“Our outcomes present that who you are married to, and the way a lot training they’ve, matter on your well being,” mentioned Andrew Halpern-Manners, an affiliate professor within the Division of Sociology at IU. “This supplies additional proof that training, along with being precious for people, can also be a sharable useful resource.”

The researchers used greater than half a century’s value of knowledge from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Examine, a wealthy longitudinal examine of people, their spouses, their siblings and their siblings’ spouses that features details about respondents’ well being, marriages, academic attainments and the tutorial attainments of their spouses. Because of the timing of the examine, which started in 1957, it solely refers to heterosexual {couples}.

Elaine M. Hernandez, co-author of the examine and an assistant professor within the Division of Sociology at IU, mentioned researchers have routinely noticed a relationship between spousal training and well being, however the nature of this relationship has been more durable to ascertain. As a result of more healthy folks are likely to have extra education and to accomplice with those that are also extremely educated, it may be tough to isolate the distinctive impact of spousal training.

To handle this, the workforce in contrast the self-rated well being of siblings whose spouses had completely different ranges of education. The concept, Halpern-Manners mentioned was to search out pairs of people that have been as comparable as potential throughout a wide range of dimensions after which ask whether or not variations of their companions’ training might clarify variations of their well being.

They discovered that the impact of spousal training on an individual’s self-assessed general well being is optimistic and comparatively massive, suggesting that folks profit from having extra extremely educated companions in the identical approach (and to roughly the identical extent) that they profit from being extremely educated themselves.

This sample was particularly pronounced amongst girls, whose well being was extra intently tied to spousal training than males’s. This discovering, Hernandez mentioned, might mirror the time interval (Sixties-Nineteen Seventies) through which many of the respondents accomplished their training, married and entered the labor pressure.

“The truth that we observe important cross-over results signifies that training has health-enhancing advantages for the person, however it additionally has tangible advantages for these round them — particularly intimate ties,” Halpern-Manners mentioned. “This underscores the significance of training — as a public good value investing in — and means that its general public well being impression could also be bigger than we sometimes think about.”

Tabitha G. Wilbur, a PhD candidate within the Division of Sociology at IU, additionally contributed to the examine.