ABSTRACT
Understanding of the retirement experience has increased since the notso-distant past, when it was assumed that retirement was largely an individual experience. There is a general recognition that retirement is a family experience, affecting not only the individual retiring, but those in the close family circle—spouses and children. This chapter seeks to address limitations of previous research by specifying a six-month period in the retirement process and by providing data from both spouses in a qualitative format that captures the subjective meaning of the retirement transition. Retirement dates were determined by means of periodic surveys of Normative Aging Study (NAS) participants, and other study sources. Of the subsample of ninety-two NAS men who participated in this retirement study, the average age was sixty-two. Sixty percent had been employed in white-collar jobs before retirement, and 40 percent in blue-collar jobs.
