Gerontologists often assert that retirement is a """"""""process"""""""", i.e., a dynamic experience taking place over a period of time. Despite this important emphasis on evolving experience, little research effort has gone into substantiating it. As it now stands, the retirement process is an intuitively appealing but vague notion. This project will conduct a coordinated programmatic series of analyses on existing panel data in order to specify men's processes of anticipation and adaptation preceding and following the event of retirement. The project will first examine work and retirement orientation over the pre-retirement years to determine whether there is a disengagement from work and a gathering involvement with upcoming retirement, testing hypotheses about gradual and discrete patterns of change. Attitudes and activities over the post-retirement period will also be studied to determine whether retirement experience varies with the duration of retirement; in particular, whether the post-retirement period is marked by a period of letdown or dysphoria. Finally, the project will determine the extent to which workers from different pre-retirement vantage points have realistic expectations of retirement relative to their later experience of retired life. Data analyses will be based on a 12-year, 5-wave panel study of work and retirement issues; surveys were conducted between 1975 and 1987 among some 1,800 male participants in the V.A. Normative Aging Study in Boston. (Funds were not originally available for the proposed analyses.) Changes in the variables chosen to index the pre- and post-retirement processes will be observed over multiple time axes (age, pre-retirement proximity, length of time retired). Statistical models for the analysis of longitudinal data will be structured to test for non-linear patterns of change. Assuming that there is no single or unitary process of retirement, analyses describing group differences in retirement processes are planned. Accurate information about the course of men's retirement experience will be of practical benefit to prospective retirees, as well as to practitioners and planners who disseminate lifestyle advice to persons of retireable age.
| Ekerdt, D J; DeViney, S (1993) Evidence for a preretirement process among older male workers. J Gerontol 48:S35-43 |
