Mental Health and Matching Characteristics of Spouse

Indonesia is a large multi cultural country. Development of transportation infrastructure, social, education and economic opportunities encourage people to move not only in the same sub district or regency or province but also moves across provinces.Hence intermarriage between individual with different ethnic background is bound to happen. Using the Indonesia Family Live Survey (IFLS), this paper explore the level of matching of the ethnic, religion, education and age of spouses and family background of three cohorts: born before 1962, born 1962-1976 and born after 1976. The paper also examines the correlation of the matching of the characteristic of the spouse with mental health condition of the person. The descriptive statistics and multivariate regression used to explore matching characteristic and family background of the spouse and its correlation with mental health controlling for social condition of the individual, household and community. Different Ethnic group of spouse significatly increase felt bothered by things that usually don’t bother, felt depressed, felt fearful and felt lonely. Living in urban and outside Java worsen mental health condition of couple with unmatched characteristics