Impact of Social Support on Wellbeing of Hindu and Muslim Widows

A widow is a woman whose spouse has died and she has not married again. This situation creates a kind of solitude in her life that leaves 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 resulting 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 Interpersonal Support Evaluation List developed by Cohen et al. , (1985) and 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.