Adjustment to Retirement

Retirement adjustment is important to study for several reasons. First, the face of retirement is changing as a result of the aging baby boom cohort and the sheer size of the group of people that will be entering retirement over the next several decades. The proportion of the population reaching retirement age is higher than it has ever been in the history of the U.S., and is projected to double by 2050 (Jacobsen, et al., 2011).

Furthermore, people are living much longer, and, consequently, more years after retirement (Alley & Crimmins, 2007). Therefore, people are living as retirees for a larger portion of life. In particular, people can expect to live four to five years longer after retirement than they were in 1950 (Board of Trustees, 2010, Table V.A). This difference is further expected to increase another two years by 2050.

Because more people are entering their retirement years and people are living in retirement longer, these longer periods spent living in the retirement years lead to more nuances in how people retire (Ekerdt, 2010). These patterns include such increasingly popular trends as un-retirement and bridge retirement (Alley & Crimmins, 2007; Maestas and Caws, 2007; Wang, Adams, Beehr, & Shultz, 2009; Quinn, 2010; Wang, 2013).

One of the issues that must be studied in retirement is how people adjust to this significant change in their lives. Retirement adjustment has been broadly conceptualized as “a person's positive retirement experiences” (Atchley, 1999; Donaldson, et al., 2010, p. 280). The concept of this transition to retirement life has become a focus in the media as well as academic literature in recent years (Wang, Henkens, & Van Solinge, 2011). While early retirement researchers often viewed retirement ...

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...eness will be more likely to show consistent levels of retirement adjustment variables across measurement interval; and finally, f) those who are more optimistic will be more likely to show consistent levels of retirement adjustment variables across measurement intervals.

It is further hypothesized that direct and indirect effects will intervene in these relationships. Specifically, the relationship between personality variables and retirement adjustment will vary as a function of psychological and physical health, income, and marital status. Additionally, age, gender, ethnicity, and education will be systematically controlled for in the analysis, since demographic variables have been shown to affect both personality stability (Löckenhoff et al., 2008) and retirement-related outcomes (e.g., Belgrave, 1988; Howard et al., 1986; Pienta, 2003; Löckenhoff, et al., 2009).