Impact of Social Support on the Wellbeing of Hindu and Muslim Widows
Abstract
A widow is a woman whose spouse has died and she has not married again. This situation creates a kind of solitude in the life of a person but the experience of being widow of a female leaves a deep scars in her mind and it turns her life pattern into a kind of symbolic death that is mainly given by the society in the
form of innumerable restrictions imposed on her and segregation from the society considering her as a bad omen. This kind of inhuman treatment of the society that widows often face in throughout the life has detrimental impact on their wellbeing in the form of disturbed physical, social, emotional health. Therefore the present study is designed to ascertain the impact of social support on the wellbeing of widows. For this purpose 100 Hindu and 100 Muslim widows were selected through purposive sampling technique and they were measured on the Interpersonal Support Evaluation List developed by Cohen et al., (1985) and the wellbeing scale developed by Jagsharanbir Singh and Dr. Asha Gupta (2001). Data has been analyzed with the help of t test and simple linear regression model. Result revealed that social support has been emerged as a significant predictor of wellbeing and both the groups were found to differ significantly on the measures of social support and wellbeing.
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