Planning and preparing for retirement is increasingly viewed as a long-term process that begins in early adulthood. Unfortunately, however, we know very little about the ways in which retirement outcomes are influenced by experiences earlier in life. Most research on retirement has focused primarily on age, educational attainment, occupational characteristics, earnings, wealth, pension eligibility, family structure, health and other contemporaneous characteristics of individuals and their families. The fundamental contribution of our proposed research is to address the question: "How does a careful examination of the life pathways through which individuals come to possess these well-established correlates of retirement outcomes enhance our understanding of the retirement process. This research uses data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS) collected between 1957 and 2004. These data provide unique analytic opportunities as the only survey to follow a large group of Americans from adolescence to the retirement years. Using data from the WLS, the PIs examine linkages between educational, occupational, economic, family, and health trajectories across the life course and four aspects of the retirement process: (1) the timing of retirement transitions; (2) retirement intentions articulated when respondents were in their early 50s; (3) the congruence (or lack thereof) between retirement intentions and actual outcomes; and (4) emotional well-being following the transition to retirement.
The broader impact of the research can be understood within the context of institutional changes in the retirement process and increasing variation in individual life experiences. It is possible that variation in educational, occupational, economic, and family experiences across the life course have become more important for understanding how individuals experience the retirement process as individual responsibility for retirement planning and preparation has increased. At the same time, increasing labor force participation of married women, growing economic inequality, growing health inequality, and the increase in divorce and step-family formation all suggest greater individual variation in the well-established correlates of retirement experiences. With the front end of the baby boom birth cohorts rapidly approaching retirement, linkages between life experiences and individual and family circumstances in late mid-life are increasingly relevant for understanding variation in the retirement transitions and well-being of older Americans
