Retirement Issues in American Society

The purpose of this research is to examine the consequences of retirement in American society for persons aged 62 to 65 and above. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which issues of retirement assume significance in the contemporary culture and then to explore the sociological consequences of retirement, which can involve social-role changes, changes in marital and family interaction, changes in economic, psychological, and physical health, as well as differences in experience according to sex.

The United States government has sponsored two major studies of myriad aspects of retirement in the last thirty years. In 1969, the so-called Retirement History Survey (RHS) began tracking the experiences of a group of men and unmarried women aged 58 to 63. The data-gathering process ended in 1979, when final analyses began (Juster & Suzman, 1995). The principal focus of the study was financial; that is, figures for Social Security earnings were tracked against the financial status and decisions about remaining or leaving the labor force. Although the RHS became a social-science database standard for retirement-related studies, Juster and Suzman point out (pp. 7-S9), events in the culture had by 1980 overtaken many of the assumptions embedded into the study sample--chief among them, given the economic focus of the data, the fact that by 1980 and certainly afterward, married women in general and married women wage earners in particular were widely perceived as

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hip ties, may influence or perhaps compensate for the economically determined aspects of retirement satisfaction (Calasanti, 1996, p. 28). Gall, Evans and Howard use the term "internal locus of control" to objectively formulate the subjective, psychological factors that inform the experience of seemingly straightforward financial conditions. Another interpretation of the connection between objective financial condition and the experience of financial reality in retirement populations is advanced by Pampel and Hardy (1994). They explain (p. 289) that, given the common experience of old age across class and population subgroups, "the importance of socioeconomic stratification . . . depends on the ability of public transfers to counter market-based advantages after exit from the labor force. As cohorts age, they come to rely more on public transfers," or publicly funded programs that compensate for market-based financial and social-status differentials. Pampel and Hardy cite research contending that the mere passage of time, first on account of advancing age, second on account of the lengthening period of separation from the labor force, and third on the tendency of increased numbers of individuals to become less dependent on workfor

Category: Government - R