We briefly review the research evidence, including the hypothesized mechanisms through which pet ownership may influence health outcomes. In comparison, cat people were generally about 12 percent more neurotic ; however, they were also 11 percent more open than dog people. We do know that pet ownership cannot change some biological variables, such as gender, age, and race; but it is plausible that pet ownership may influence other variables, including health-related characteristics. RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, California, United States of America, Affiliation While each of these quasi-experimental methods can help reduce selection bias, they also require careful consideration for proper identification of instruments, cutoffs, and covariates. When health-related respondent characteristics were added to the model, all previously observed associations remained and, similar to results above, respondents with current asthma were more likely to own a dog and cat while BMI, and general health were not associated with pet ownership in the adjusted models, see Table 4. We use a large, population-based survey from California administered in 2003 (n = 42,044) and find that pet owners and non-pet owners differ across many traits, including gender, age, race/ethnicity, living arrangements, and income. Only 7.3% had current asthma, the average BMI was 26.6, and the average self-reported general health was 3.5 (where 1 = poor and 5 = excellent). These multivariate results also show that lower odds of owning a cat are associated with older age and non-white race. Image Courtesy of Beate. The extent to which these studies of the therapeutic environment can be generalized to the presence of pets in the home, and of public health outcomes is somewhat dubious. The weights created using boosted regression provide the estimated conditional odds of receiving treatment where Xi is the vector of control variables and p(Xi) is the estimated conditional probability of receiving treatment for an individual with control variables equal to Xi. Pet owners and non-pet owners differ across many socio-demographic variables, such as gender, age, race, living arrangements, income, and employment status. For example, with adults recovering from illness, some studies have found pet owners do better while others have found that they do worse. Additionally, dog owners are more likely to be home owners and have a higher household annual income; and dog and cat owners are more likely to own their own home and have larger households (but there is no relationship to annual household income). These results show that respondents who were female and single, owned a home, lived in a house, had higher annual household income, lived in a more rural location, had a larger household size, and lived in a household where everyone worked full time were more likely to own a dog while respondents of older age and of non-white race were less likely to own a dog. Other studies have documented negative effects of pets including dog bites, spreading of disease, and have shown that pet ownership is associated with asthma and other allergies [4–8], and associations with a higher incidence of heart attacks and readmissions in heart attack patients [9]. e0179494. We found no significant difference in trainability (t = 1.946; p = 0.052), or boldness (t = 0.519; p = 0.604) traits between the dog groups. We include a discussion about how the factors associated with the selection into the pet ownership group are related to a range of mental and physical health outcomes. Dog owners were also more likely to also own a cat. Personality Differences Between Dog and Cat Owners. In other words, factors that contribute to selecting to have a dog could themselves have health impacts that could be mistakenly attributed to dog ownership. The model was less effective at predicting cat ownership—again, apartment dwellers were less likely to own a cat, females were also more likely to own a cat, and there was a slight age effect, with respondents aged from 45 to 64 more likely to own a cat than other age groups. It is also assumed that individuals with the same preference for type of pet … In one of the most methodologically sophisticated studies examining this phenomenon, Headey and Grabka [27] employed propensity score matching to ensure, as far as possible, equivalence in owners and non-owners in Germany. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0179494, Editor: Meghan Byrne, Public Library of Science, UNITED STATES, Received: November 4, 2015; Accepted: May 31, 2017; Published: June 23, 2017. In the UK, dog owners tend to be from larger families with females, and young adults and older children, and the presence of other animals such as horses, birds, and cats, were more likely to have a dog [29]. The person who owns a dog has to take the dog out for a walk now and then. Many people correlate being a pet owner with having a higher well being. Funding: This work was funded by a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R01HD066591) to Jeremy Miles (https://www.nichd.nih.gov/about/org/der/branches/cdbb/programs/psad/HAI/Pages/overview.aspx). Most dog owners exercise their dogs, and although not the primary aim, exercising one’s dog also usually involves exercising oneself. For example, dog owners differ from non-dog owners, according to research conducted in Ireland [28]. For the study, more than 1,000 pet owners across the country were surveyed about their furry friends. broad scope, and wide readership – a perfect fit for your research every time. Research examining potential differences between pet owners and non-owners is prevalent in the scientific literature, but findings have often been inconsistent. Patients who owned a dog had a much higher rate of one year survival– 6% of dog owning patients did not survive their first year, compared to 28% of non-dog owning patients. We include a discussion about how the factors associated with the selection into the pet ownership group are related to a range of mental and physical health outcomes. Overall, they estimated the treatment effect of pet ownership resulted in a 24% reduction in annual doctor visits. ¬)Ä�’hâ©d¬u>íª¸Rğc�Àx½²,ãÚ‘TX|Z’P No, Is the Subject Area "Mental health and psychiatry" applicable to this article? If so, non-pet-related differences such as socioeconomic status might be the real cause of … When examining the relationship between pet ownership and health, it is helpful to first consider the mechanisms through which we believe the effect might work. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. In an Australian sample the majority of dog owners walked their dog with almost a quarter of them walking together five or more times per week, however dog owners were significantly more likely to exercise at least 90 minutes per week [12]. This study questions pet owners in Taiwan because Topics on dogs extend to friend groups and facilitate interpersonal communication (Hirschman, 1994). CHIS collected extensive information on health status, health conditions, health-related behaviors, health insurance coverage and access to health care services as well as demographic and socioeconomic information. For example, researchers have found that owners scored higher Among working adults, the average number of hours worked per week was 25.6 and everyone living in the household worked full time in 40.2% of households. The current research found that income and full-time employment were associated with increased likelihood of dog ownership. For example, there is a strong inverse relationship between social class and health [39], and it has been estimated that poverty accounts for 6% of mortality in the US [40]. They support their theory using the findings from 69 empirical studies that ranged in population, methods, measures, and design; however, the theory has yet to be specifically tested. In multivariate analyses, single male status, older age, and non-white race were associated with lower odds of owning a dog and cat while single female status, larger household size, home ownership, more rural location, living in a house, and full time employment in the household were associated with higher odds of pet ownership. The effect size of the association between pet ownership and doctor visits was reduced after matching across 11 variables—the mean difference between the groups was reduced from .44 visits to .28 visits after selection bias was taken into account. A woman coming back home wants her cat’s affection. In some cases the depth of feeling for their chosen species. While the published scholarly studies do not provide strong support for a link between pet ownership and health, some evidence does points in that direction, and researchers are calling for stronger methodological studies [3]. However, this study suggests that interaction with, and feedback from, the animal may be important in emotional regulation, and the authors hypothesized that the interaction provided a form of social support. In sum, we conducted four types of analyses: (1) a descriptive comparison of the weighted sample characteristics of each group without adjusting for other variables, (2) survey-weighted univariate logistic regression models regressing each type of pet ownership on each of the covariates of interest in its own separate model; (3) survey-weighted multivariate logistic regression models including only socio-demographic variables (models control for all independent variables simultaneously); and (4) multivariate logistic regression models including both socio-demographic and other health variables (models control for all independent variables simultaneously). Gosling (2007) showed that dog owners were found to be less neurotic than cat people and scored lower on openness. BMI, and general health were not associated with cat ownership after adjusting for other characteristics. Yes Pet selection effects are rarely accounted for in existing research, making it impossible to separate the potential impacts of pet ownership from the factors that differentiate those who select to live with a pet from those who select not to. They may possess a more abstract thinking style, in comparison to … Data Availability: Data are available from UCLA Center for Health Policy Research: http://healthpolicy.ucla.edu/chis/data/Pages/overview.aspx. Recent work by Beetz and colleagues [16] pulled together the evidence on the impact of human-animal interaction research to present a unified theory on the causal mechanism for the wide array of consistent impacts (e.g., social attention and behavior, interpersonal interactions, mood, heart rate, blood pressure, fear and anxiety, mental and physical health and cardiovascular function) and inconsistent effects (on stress and epinephrine/norepinephrine, immune system functioning, pain management, aggression, empathy, learning). Therefore, we model two different regressions: one set that includes variables that can never (or are unlikely to be) changed by pet ownership; and another that includes a set of variables that might be influenced by pet ownership. The mental health benefits of interacting with animals outside the therapeutic environment have been studied less—in part because of the difficulties of carrying out methodologically rigorous research outside the controlled environment of therapy. For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click Our goals for this paper are twofold: (1) Describe how pet owners and non-pet owners differ. A sophisticated propensity score weighting method using generalized boosted regression, a data-adaptive, nonparametric logistic regression technique was developed at the RAND Corporation which can accommodate complex and nonlinear relationships between covariates and treatment selection [46]. A pet owner will take the occasional selfie with their dog while a pet parent will have entire albums and collages of them and their pet doing almost everything together. Competing interests: None of the authors have relevant financial disclosures to make. Because our study is cross-sectional, we need to be very careful and precise when interpreting results concerning health-related characteristics. With respect to cat ownership, Table 2 shows similar univariate associations with the odds of owning a cat as seen with dog ownership, with the exception that female single respondents had a higher odds of owning a cat (rather than lower), age was not associated with cat ownership, and higher BMI and larger household size were associated with lower odds of owning a cat. In our analyses, it appears that it may inflate them, as pet owner characteristics are associated with better mental and physical health outcomes. Yes Two theories exist regarding the effects of social support—the ‘main effect’ hypothesis suggests that the beneficial effects are diffuse, the ‘buffering’ hypothesis suggests that social support effects are notable only in the presence of stressors. Two experiments provide evidence of these mechanisms, but how these results translate into long term differences in animal owners’ health is unknown. There is clear evidence of short-term differences in psychological adjustment that may be attributed to animal interactions; however, how these changes translate into public health outcomes for pet owners or within the general population has yet to be determined. When health-related respondent characteristics were added to the survey-weighted multivariate logistic models (Table 4), all previously observed associations remained, and respondents with a higher BMI and current asthma were more likely to own a dog. The owners were also asked to complete an assessment of their key personality traits--including the ones psychologists call the "Big Five:" openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. All analyses presented in this paper are weighted using the CHIS survey weights which appropriately account for the sample design, nonresponse, and representativeness. Is there something about pet owners that is inherently different about these groups that may also affect health? Table 2 shows the odds ratio of each characteristic being associated with the different categories of pet ownership using survey weights, meaning that we can conclude that when there is a significant difference (p < .05), there is a difference between dog owners and non-dog owners in terms of this characteristic. Some studies have indicated differences between owners and non-owners whereas others have not. This research has some limitations. Most problematic, these studies use convenience samples that may not be representative of the general population, examine a narrow range of outcome variables, and use cross sectional designs that do not consider long-term health outcomes. In Survey 2, owners of mixed-breeds reported their dogs’ behaviour as more problematic (t-test, N = 6,384 t = 5.577; p < 0.001, Cohen’s d = 0.140), than the owners … Discover a faster, simpler path to publishing in a high-quality journal. PLoS ONE 12(6): The average household size was 3.3 with a minimum household size of 1 and maximum of 18, 55.9% of respondents owned a home, 66% lived in a house, 56.6% worked full time and 32.2% of respondents had a full-time employed spouse. All the research to date suffers from several limitations that prevent any strong conclusions about the health effects of pet ownership from being made. According to some research, pet owners are indeed different across a wide range of variables that are also related to health; however there are only a few empirical studies that help us understand how they may be different and how large that difference may be. In a follow up study, they further explored this result, finding that there were differences in heart rate variability between pet owners and non-owners who had survived a heart attack, and suggested that this may be a mediating factor in the effect of pets on survival [25]. H4: Pet attachment is the mediator between personality trait and interpersonal communication competence. Allen, Blascovich, and Mendes [15] tested the buffering hypothesis by subjecting individuals to stressful situations, examining the effects of social support from pet cats, dogs, spouses and friends. Pet lifestyle, or psychographic, segmentation is a powerful strategy that moves beyond differences between pet owners and non-pet owners and between dog versus cat owners to segmenting U.S. pet owners into meaningful groups based on their attachment to, attitudes toward and … The authors tested 82 pet owners and 48 non-pet owners in this survey and paid special attention to the personality characteristics of pet owners highly attached to their pets. And still other studies have found no link between pet owners and health outcomes [10]. Within each household, separate interviews were conducted with a randomly selected adult (age 18 and over), adolescents (ages 12–17), and parents of children (ages 0 to 11). The results showed that individuals who had a pet had lower heart rate and blood pressure at rest than those without pets. Such research demonstrating the benefits of animals with clinical populations has been carried out primarily with dogs [19], but has also examined the impact of cats [20], horses [21], dolphins [10], guinea pigs [22], and the robotic dog Aibo [23]. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0179494.t003. However, sometimes there are problems due to the differences in personality between that of the owner and that of the pet. We begin by looking at simple weighted differences between pet owners and non-pet owners, and then move on to survey-weighted logistic regression analyses to investigate individual characteristics associated with dog ownership, cat ownership, dog or cat ownership, and dog and cat ownership. Therefore, it is possible that some of the positive associations between health and dog ownership found in studies that did not adjust for income could be over- or underestimated due to selection bias. We believe this approach is most appropriate for causal analyses that model outcomes of pet ownership because the type, strength, and form of the relationship between the predictors and ownership (e.g., “treatment”) have not been empirically established. This study represents the most rigorous causal test of pet ownership on overall health, using doctor visits as a proxy. While this study clearly demonstrates that isolating pet ownership from confounds is important for precise estimates of its causal impact, it falls short of a definitive answer since there are other differences limiting its generalizability, such as cultural differences between German and Australia samples, the use of doctor’s visits as a proxy for health, potential missing variable bias, among others. here. CHIS is the largest state-level health survey and is designed to provide population-based estimates for the state of California, California counties, and major ethnic groups. ;o¾ÜÁ While there is a difference between being a pet owner and a pet parent, the truth is that it's almost always only a matter of time before any pet owner becomes a pet parent. This study examines how pet and non-pet owners differ across a variety of socio-demographic and health measures, which has implications for the proper interpretation of a large number of correlational studies that attempt to draw causal attributions. If so, non-pet-related differences such as socioeconomic status might be the real cause of … We find that the following characteristics are associated with higher odds of owning a dog: female, regardless of marital status; married males and females; White; older age; owning a home; better general health; higher household income; more rural location; living in a house; having current asthma; being in a household where everyone works full time; working more hours per week; being full time employed, and; having a spouse that is employed full time. No, Is the Subject Area "Socioeconomic aspects of health" applicable to this article? Both studies provide strong evidence for stress buffering effects, but their methods limit the researchers’ abilities in concluding that these effects lead to any long term psychological of physical health benefits in a sample drawn from the general population. Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field. Other potential methods could use natural experiments and instrumental variable approaches [43], with some potential instruments being different housing policies surrounding pet ownership. Propensity score modeling can decrease bias by 58% to 96%, depending on the covariates used in the model and outcome variable [42], but it is by no means the only modeling technique that can help account for potential selection bias in observational data. The regression results are reported using odds ratios, which are transformations of the coefficients from the logistic regressions. Our final sample included 42,044 adults for whom Individual characteristics and self-reported cat and dog ownership were available. (2) Describe why this difference needs to be accounted for in observational research on pet ownership and health. Although some pet owners and non-owners might fit these stereotypes, studies have failed to confirm them for most. That is, with a large sample size, a difference may be significance but the size of the difference may not be meaningful. The results showed that petting a toy animal was not significantly better than petting no animal at reducing anxiety; however, petting a real animal did significantly reduce anxiety. Previous research suggests that pet owners are psychologically different than non-owners in terms of self-esteem and other personality characteristics. One research line has focused on how pet ownership may improve the physical health of owners. Another potential approach utilizes causal models proposed by Rubin. For example, there is ample evidence that socioeconomic status is related to a number of health outcomes [37–39, 41]. Household income was not associated with ownership in the adjusted model, see Table 3. He proposed a causal model to eliminate group differences on the back end, mimicking the conditions and covariate balance of a randomized controlled trial [45]. Citation: Saunders J, Parast L, Babey SH, Miles JV (2017) Exploring the differences between pet and non-pet owners: Implications for human-animal interaction research and policy. The odds ratio for a dichotomous variable should be interpreted as follows: A number over 1 means that this characteristic is positively related to pet ownership, e.g., Home owners OR = 2.72, meaning home owners are 2.72 times more likely to own a dog. In other words, pet owners might be different to begin with. Thus, these findings illustrate that pet and non-pet owners differ, but in no way represent all the differences between the groups. A second experiment, involving 56 dog owners (91 percent of whom were women, with a mean age of 42 and average annual family income of $65,000), examined whether pet owners benefit more when their pet is perceived to fulfill their social needs better. No, Is the Subject Area "Asthma" applicable to this article? The research on determinants of health taken together with research examining differences between pet owners and non owners suggests that some of the health differences observed between pet owners and non owners could be over- or underestimated due to differences in socio-demographic variables such as age, race, gender, employment, income, and housing, and not necessarily (or solely) differences in pet ownership patterns. Indeed, this is exactly what was identified in previous research—once differences in predictors were accounted for, the relationship between pet ownership and doctor visits shrank to half its size [27]. First they surveyed 217 people, determining differences between pet owners and nonowners in terms of well-being, personality type and attachment style. CHIS 2003 was conducted between August 2003 and February 2004. We thank YuChing Yang, Carlo Carino and the staff of the California Health Interview Survey. Yes In a test of the buffering effect hypothesis, researchers tested whether animals could moderate the anxiety inducing effects of a stressful situation [14]. Yes Although some researchers have incorporated animal preference into their investigations of pet ownership, such research is scarce and inconclusive. On the flip side, pet owners are sometimes pegged as socially awkward, excessively shy or downright antisocial, preferring animals to people. No, Is the Subject Area "Cats" applicable to this article? We use a large, population-based survey from California administered in 2003 (n = 42,044) and find that pet owners and non-pet owners differ across many traits, including gender, age, race/ethnicity, living arrangements, and income. We suggest adjusting for confounding variables using propensity score matching through case weight adjustments. Smaller household sizes, home ownership, living in a home, full time employment of the household, and more rural location were associated with higher odds of owning a cat.

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