Retirement (051721)

How do people adjust to retirement? This is an area in which there has been a fair amount of systematic research as well as a good deal of theorizing.

Apparently most people respond favorably to life in retirement. In our study of retired teachers and telephone company employees, not quite 30 per cent felt that they would never get used to retirement. Harris found that 33 per cent of his sample viewed retirement as less than satisfactory. 

(...) Among those who encounter difficulty adjusting to retirement, financial problems head the list (40 per cent), followed by health problems (28 per cent), missing one's job (22 per cent), and death of spouse (10 per cent). Retirement per se is directly responsible for only two of these sources of difficulty: missing one's job and financial problems. Health problems are almost always a cause rather than a consequence of retirement. And certainly retirement is only rarely directly related to the death of one's spouse.

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Theory is a necessary element in the development of knowledge. Theory serves to identify gaps in knowledge and as a guide for organizing research. With regard to adjustment to retirement, theories are needed to describe and explain 1) adjustment to changes in income and 2) adjustment to no longer having job responsibilities. As yet no theory concerning how people adjust to income decline has been developed. What is needed is descriptive data necessary to begin to develop such a theory have not been assembled.

More attention has been given to the problem of adjusting to the loss of one's job. Several theories of adjustment have emerged, each of which has a different emphasis.

Activity theory assumes that the job means different things to different people and that to adjust successfully to the loss of one's job, one must find a substitute for whatever personal goal the job was used to achieve. The most often quoted proponents of this theory are Friedmann and Havighurst and Miller. Friedmann and Havighurst approach the matter in terms of substitute activities, and Miller carried it one step further to include substitute activities which served as new sources of identity. The assumption here is that the individual will seek and find a work substitute. In a test of this theory, however, Shanas found it to be of very limited utility when applied to American society. In my (Atchley, 1975) own research, activity theory has fit the behavior of only a tiny proportion of retired people.

Continuity theory assumes that, whenever possible, the individual will cope with retirement by increasing the time spent in roles he already plays rather than by finding new roles to play. This assumption is based on the finding that older people tend to stick with tried and true ways rather than to experiment, and on the assumption that most retired people want their life in retirement to be as much like their life retirement to be as much like their preretirement life as possible. However, continuity theory allows for a gradual reduction in overall activity. Obviously, these basic assumptions do not fit all retired people, although they may fit the majority.

Disengagement theory holds that retirement is a necessary manifestation of the mutual withdrawal of society and the older individual from one another as a consequence of the increased prospect of biological failure in the individual organism. This theory has been criticized for making the rejection of older people by society seem "natural" and, therefore, right. However, the fact of the matter is that many people do want to withdraw from full-time jobs and welcome the opportunity to do so. Streib and Schneider refined disengagement theory to apply more directly to the realities of retirement. Differential disengagement is the term they use to reflect the idea that disengagement can occur at different rates for different roles. And they do not contend that disengagement is irreversible. They hold that by removing the necessity for energy-sapping labor on a job, retirement may free the individual with declining energy to increase his level of engagement in other spheres of life. Such increases in involvement do in fact occur.

Thus, both continuity theory and the theory of differential disengagement attempt to explain why people do not adjust to retirement as activity theory would lead us to expect.

Hazardous as it may be, I would like to offer another approach to understanding adjustment to the loss of job which accompanies retirement, It is to some extent speculative, but I think it is also based on the facts as we now know them. It also synthesizes the major elements of the three theories mentioned above. In sum, the central processes of adjustment are held to be internal compromised and interpersonal negotiations. While these two elements interact quite strongly in real situations, for analytical purposes I shall treat them separately.

When a person retires, a new role is taken on and an old one relinquished, at least to a degree. The extent to which this triggers a need for a new adjustment on the part of the individual depends on how the job role fits into his pattern of adjustment prior to retirement.

It is probably safe to say that retirement represents a certain amount of disruption in the lives of just about everyone who retires. But why is this disruption so much more serious for some than for others? The answer to this is to be found by examining the relationship between the amount of change introduced by retirement and the capacity of the individual to deal with change routinely.

When people can deal with a substantial amount of change in a more or less routine fashion, we call them flexible. We also tend to think of changes as serious only if they exceed the magnitude which can be dealt with routinely by the individual. People who have difficulty adjusting to retirement can be people with a low level of tolerance for any change (inflexible). They can also be people who are confronted with especially serious change. Obviously, the degree to which any change is serious depends on how adaptable the individual is. Thus, among those who have difficulty adjusting to retirement, we would expect to find a group of rigid, inflexible people for whom even small changes in the status quo are seen as serious. We would also expect to find a group of reasonably flexible people who are having to adjust to what seems to them a high magnitude of change.

A second important variable is the individual's hierarchy of personal goals. Everyone has personal goals - important results which, if achieved, give the individual a strong sense of personal worth or satisfaction. Theses goals are of several types. Some of them involve learning to respond to life in a particular manner - the development of certain personal qualities, such as honesty, ambition, cheerfulness, kindness, and so on, which can be exhibited in most situations and in most roles. Other personal goals are materialistic and involve achieving ownership of particular property such as land, house, stereo, car, etc. Still other personal goals involve successfully playing certain roles. Thus, a person's desire to succeed as a parent, a job-holder, an artist, or any number of other roles can be viewed also in relation to this hierarchy of personal goals.

These various types of goals differ a great deal in terms of their transferability and their capacities as enduring sources of satisfaction. Materialistic goals seem to be the most transitory. After material goals are achieved, they seem to have the capacity to turn to ashes in the mouth of the achiever. This process of disillusionment can take some time, however, and many people have materialistic goals they never achieve. Thus, while this type of goal may have materialistic goals they never achieve. Thus, while this type of goal may have certain drawbacks, it is a common type of goal in American society. And to the extent that lowered income in retirement interferes with materialistic goals not yet achieved, retirement can trigger adjustment problems.