Previous research on older adults who are widowed often focuses on the immediate subjective impacts of spousal loss, and how gender might influence this. Our interest here is on the factors that influence subjective well-being after a period of at least two years’ post-bereavement, and how this might differ for men and women. We draw on theoretical considerations from previous research on gender and on widowhood and use two different measures—life satisfaction and happiness—to assess possible differences in this subjective outcome. We used data from the 2014 Health and Retirement Study on 692 widowed adults aged 65 and over (578 females and 114 males) and employed regression and postestimation analyses to examine whether and how gender influences their subjective well-being. Our findings show that gender did not affect overall levels of subjective well-being, regardless of measure. However, gender did influence the predictors, such as total household income, total wealth, and social support from children and friends, for life satisfaction and happiness somewhat differently. Our study highlights the importance of examining gender differences among older widows and widowers and also underlines the importance of introducing different measures of subjective well-being that might yield different yet valuable findings.

以前对丧偶老年人的研究通常侧重于失去配偶的直接主观影响，以及性别如何影响这一点。我们在这里的兴趣是在丧亲后至少两年后影响主观幸福感的因素，以及男性和女性之间的差异。我们借鉴先前关于性别和守寡的研究的理论考虑，并使用两种不同的衡量标准——生活满意度和幸福——来评估这种主观结果的可能差异。我们使用了 2014 年健康和退休研究中对 692 名 65 岁及以上的丧偶成年人（578 名女性和 114 名男性）的数据，并采用回归和后估计分析来检验性别是否以及如何影响他们的主观幸福感。我们的研究结果表明，无论衡量标准如何，性别都不会影响主观幸福感的整体水平。然而，性别确实对生活满意度和幸福感等预测因子产生了不同的影响，例如家庭总收入、总财富以及来自孩子和朋友的社会支持。我们的研究强调了检查老年寡妇和鳏夫之间性别差异的重要性，并强调了引入不同的主观幸福感测量方法的重要性，这些测量方法可能会产生不同但有价值的发现。