etirement studies, beginning with gender but extending to race and ethnicity, labor-force gender and minority-group configuration, physical and mental health, and sundry behavioral variables. Even the financial variables of the RHS had limited utility for meaningful analysis by the mid-1980s, owing to the growth of various privately funded pension plans. A consequence was the so-called Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a longitudinal ten-year study that began in the early 1990s and results of which appear to have been first reported in 1995. The variable set for HRS includes financial data from Social Security, IRS, and private-sector sources, as well as health, social, and demographic attributes, and the sample cuts across lines of gender and race (Juster & Suzman, 1995; Wallace & Herzog, 1995). Health and other factors influencing how retirement decisions are arrived at as well as the experience of retirement itself are at the core of HRS. While as of 1997 the HRS is not complete, preliminary data have been analyzed, and so-called "alpha release" data interpreted. Side by side with the enlarged study design of HRS compared to RHS from the 1980s onward have been various smaller-scale studies that appear intended to reflect what could be called inclusive rather than exclusive samples and analytical variables.
The foregoing review of what appears to be the general approach to current retirement-research praxis is in the background of the present research. The point is that the consequences of retirement must be interpreted relative to a diversity of possible personal situations, i. e., in the context of America's increasingly diverse cultural landscape. Meanwhile, the persistence of certain social norms, notably that in the U. S. and that family-unit structures and experience are likely to be a function of male-breadwinner retirement, must also be acknowledged. Irrespective of RHS, the male-breadwinner norm is reflected in a wide ran...