Associations of subjective health status and spousal shared activities with depression among married postmenopausal women: a correlational study using data from the ninth wave of the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families

Purpose: Using data from the ninth wave of the Korean Longitudinal Survey of Women and Families (KLoWF), this study aimed to examine the relationships among subjective health status, spousal shared activities, and depression and to identify factors associated with depression among married postmenopausal women.Methods: A cross-sectional secondary analysis was performed using data from 2,317 married postmenopausal women aged 40–64 years in the ninth wave (2023) of KLoWF. SPSS/WIN 30.0 was used to calculate descriptive statistics and Pearson correlation coefficients and to conduct one-way analysis of variance and hierarchical multiple regression analyses.Results: Depression was negatively correlated with subjective health status (r=−.35, p<.001) and spousal shared activities (r=−.05, p=.017). Subjective health status and spousal shared activities were positively correlated (r=.12, p<.001). Hierarchical multiple regression identified a significant association between subjective health status and depression (β=−.31, p<.001), but no significant association between spousal shared activities and depression (β=.02, p=.257). The final model had an adjusted R2 of .14. In exploratory analyses, depression was positively associated with watching movies, performances, and sports events with a spouse (β=.08, p<.001); none of the other shared activities had a significant association with depression.Conclusion: Subjective health status had the strongest association with depression among married postmenopausal women. The findings suggest that interventions to promote mental health in this population should take subjective health status into account. Further research is needed to determine how associations with mental health outcomes vary by the specific type of spousal shared activity.