Conditions confronting individuals immediately prior to retirement can have lasting effects well into old age. The purpose of this study is to examine the family, health, and work characteristics among Americans of pre-retirement age, and to determine how these individuals' current circumstances might affect their welfare during retirement, emphasizing differences by race, gender, and ethnicity. Retirement is conceived of as a process through various activity states that differ by the amount of time available for personal and family responsibilities and the flow of income to the individual. The proposed thesis develops a simple theoretical model of the retirement process that includes the following states: unemployment, full-time employment, part-time employment, and retirement. An individual's current state suggests the nature of the transition to retirement. Utilizing data from the National institute on Aging's 1992 Health and Retirement Survey, the proposed research will employ bivariate and univariate analysis to determine whether the severity and prevalence of disability, family strain, and work stress differ among gender, racial, ethnic, marital status, and occupational categories. Multivariate analysis will be used to determine the influence of family, health, and work outcomes on plans for retirement; and a multinomial logit model will be used to analyze the effect of these different attributes on the current activity state in the retirement process. The proposed two- year study will be the dissertation research for a Ph.D. candidate in Population Dynamics with an Economics minor from the Johns Hopkins University, School of Hygiene and Public Health.
