Overview of the Health and Retirement Study and Introduction to the Special Issue

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Abstract

Twenty five years ago, the largest academic behavioral and social science project ever undertaken in the U.S. began: the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). The HRS is an invaluable publicly available dataset for investigating work, aging, and retirement and informing public policy on these issues. This biennial longitudinal study began in 1992 and has studied more than 43,000 individuals and produced almost 4000 journal articles, dissertations, books, book chapters, and reports to date. The purpose of this special issue of Work, Aging and Retirement is to describe the HRS and highlight relevant research that utilizes this rich and complex dataset. First, we briefly describe the background that led to the development of the HRS. Then we summarize key aspects of the study, including its development, sampling, and methodology. Our review of the content of the survey focuses on the aspects of the study most relevant to research on worker aging and retirement. Next, we identify key strengths and important limitations of the study and provide advice to current and future HRS data users. Finally, we summarize the articles in this Special Issue (all of which use data from the HRS) and how they advance our knowledge and understanding of worker aging and retirement.

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A survey method for characterizing daily life experience: the day reconstruction method.

Daniel Kahneman, Alan Krueger, David Schkade … (2004)

The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) assesses how people spend their time and how they experience the various activities and settings of their lives, combining features of time-budget measurement and experience sampling. Participants systematically reconstruct their activities and experiences of the preceding day with procedures designed to reduce recall biases. The DRM's utility is shown by documenting close correspondences between the DRM reports of 909 employed women and established results from experience sampling. An analysis of the hedonic treadmill shows the DRM's potential for well-being research.

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Profiling retirees in the retirement transition and adjustment process: examining the longitudinal change patterns of retirees' psychological well-being.

Mo Wang (2007)

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.