Studies of older workers' readiness to retire have reported a growing trend toward plans or expectations for earlier retirement. At the same time, other studies have shown that as workers age they prefer progressively later ages for retirement. To clarify the relationship between planned and preferred age for retirement, concurrent trends in the two measures for a single sample of male workers were compared. At two sampling times 10 years apart, a panel of 912 workers (aged 45 to 74 at T2) was asked at what age they planned to retire and at what age they preferred to retire. The pattern of joint change in these two measures showed a dynamic relationship between them. Even though panel members generally preferred to retire sooner than they planned to, preferences were revised (toward later ages) over time and tended to converge with the planned age for withdrawal from work.
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The hypothesis was investigated that older workers who are longer in the work role are more anxious to remain in their work role and prefer to retire at a later age. In the design, social class and health were age-invariant because of the selective nature of the VA Normative Aging population. These two major contaminants of the relationship between age and later retirement preference were therefore controlled. A stepwise regression analysis found that later retirement preference was related to age and social class factors, the two acting independently, and with age more than twice as important as social class. This finding is problematic because of (1) a trend to earlier mandatory retirement related to increased industrial productivity; (2) capacity for longer work life, related to improvement in health and longevity; and (3) a trend to non-manual occupation, which is less vulnerable to age decrement. In summary, contrary to disengagement theory, the desire to stave off retirement increases with age at a time of societal pressure for curtailment of work role. The solution to this dilemma lies either in expansion of work roles or massive change in values favoring earlier retirement.
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