Retirement Timing: A Review and Recommendations for Future Research

Continuity Theory holds that, in making adaptive choices, middle-aged and older adults attempt to preserve and maintain existing internal and external structures; and they prefer to accomplish this objective by using strategies tied to their past experiences of themselves and their social world. Change is linked to the person's perceived past, producing continuity in inner psychological characteristics as well as in social behavior and in social circumstances. Continuity is thus a grand adaptive strategy that is promoted by both individual preference and social approval.

The author used role theory, continuity theory, and the life course perspective to form hypotheses regarding the different retirement transition and adjustment patterns and how different individual and contextual variables related to those patterns. The longitudinal data of 2 samples (n(1) = 994; n(2) = 1,066) from the Health and Retirement Survey were used. Three latent growth curve patterns of retirees' psychological well-being were identified as coexisting in the retiree samples through growth mixture modeling (GMM) analysis. On the basis of the latent class membership derived from GMM, retiree subgroups directly linked to different growth curve patterns were profiled with individual (e.g., bridge job status) and contextual variables (e.g., spouse working status). By recognizing the existence of multiple retiree subgroups corresponding to different psychological well-being change patterns, this study suggests that retirees do not follow a uniform adjustment pattern during the retirement process, which reconciles inconsistent previous findings. A resource perspective is further introduced to provide a more integrated theory for the current findings. The practical implications of this study are also discussed at both individual level and policy level. ((c) 2007 APA, all rights reserved.