Centre for Policy on Ageing



Orderly endings — do men know when they will retire?
Author(s)	David J Ekerdt, Barbara H Vinick, Raymond Bossé
Journal title	The Journals of Gerontology, vol 44, no 1, January 1989
Pages	S28-S35
Keywords	Older men ; Retirement ; Preparation [retirement] ; Longitudinal surveys ; United States of America.
Annotation	In order to describe the subjective (as opposed to the statistical) probability of the retirement event, this study examined the timing of men's retirement relative to their own expectation. On-time and off-time retirement were assessed for a panel of older workers participating in the Veterans Administration (VA) Normative Aging Study, who were surveyed about work and retirement in 1978, 1981 and 1984. Over spans of two years, 66% of workers accurately predicted their eventual date of retirement (a year either way); 40% were exact to within 3 months. However, about one third of workers did not accurately foresee their date of retirement, having either unfulfilled plans or unanticipated retirements. From a life course perspective, the authors interpret retirement as an orderly event when two-thirds of a sample can retire as planned. From a practical perspective (e.g. an interest to programme development or research design), retirement is not orderly enough when one-third of exits are unscheduled. (RH).
Accession Number	CPA-890517075 A
Classmark	BC: G3: GA: 3J: 7T
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...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing.