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 relevant to any statistical analysis of finance-related retirement dynamics. The limited utility of the RHS has been noted in subsequent studies as well. For example, a 1989 RHS-based study of the consequences of later-life remarriage after divorce and widowhood (!) perforce confined itself to men because the RHS had done so (Bulcroft, Bulcroft, Hatch, & Borgatta, 1989).
In the mid-1980s, a host of new demographic factors presented themselves to prospective r...