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Initial pilot interviews with women whose husbands were in the first year of retirement revealed that problems of "impingement"--perceptions of husbands as intruders into their worlds-as-lived--were cited, in response to open-ended items, as the most difficult aspect of husbands' retirement. An impingement index, consisting of items constructed from those responses, was administered to the original panel of 83 women whose husbands were now in the fourth year of retirement, and to a new panel of 61 women whose husbands had been retired for one year. Paired T-tests revealed one significant difference in perceptions of impingement between the two groups of wives, and not in the expected direction. Indeed, wives in year 4 were more often bothered by some impingement conditions than wives in year 1, and these were significantly related to self-assessments of marital satisfaction. Results have implications for "adjustment" to life transitions, including situations that may inhibit initiation of adaptive responses, degree of investment in social roles, and issues of expectation.

Recent studies view retirement as a family transition that affects others in the close family circle, as well as the retiree, and is a process that occurs over time, and not as a single event. It therefore behooves us to learn more about how husbands' retirement affects the women with whom male retirees share their lives. Furthermore, most previous research has studied the wives of retirees using cross-sectional designs. In general, findings have indicated that husbands' retirement has little effect on wives' marital quality. This study is an advance over much of the previous research in that we use a longitudinal design. We have examined wives' assessments of marital quality including contextual life changes before their husbands' retirements, and have compared the assessments of the same wives following their husbands' retire-

Competing views about the effect of retirement on marital quality emphasize the potential strains as well as the potential gratifications that retirement may bring to the marriage. This study compared marital complaints between 92 older couples in which husbands had been retired one year or less, and 125 couples in which husbands remained employed. Participants were members of an ongoing panel study of aging. For a range of instrumental, affectional, and companionate behaviors, findings showed largely similar levels of complaint between couples with retired and nonretired husbands, even after taking wife's employment status into account. Results of this and other research confirm that retirement is not generally disruptive for older couples, but suggest that strains may occur in circumstances that remain to be specified (e.g., dissynchronous role transitions).