Retirement is an event that often brings about great changes in a person's personal and social life. For many people, work is not only a way to fill time and earn money, but also important for their identity and meaning in life. After retirement, these benefits of work are lost, and it is expected that people will seek substitutes for this loss. This paper focuses on the effects of retirement on informal civic activities such as the support given to family and friends as well as more formal types such as volunteering and organisational involvement. Using two waves from the Netherlands Kinship Panel Study, a conditional change model is employed. Two groups are compared: men and women who kept working, and men and women who retired. Results show that following retirement, people appear to change the nature of some relationships by providing more instrumental support. Furthermore, retirees seem to start spending more time volunteering after retirement, and they increase their organisational memberships. Implications, strengths and limitations of the study are discussed.

-This study investigates the relationship between retirement and self-rated health, and how this relationship is moderated by experienced pre-retirement physical job 2 demands and psychological job stress. Two waves of Dutch panel data are analyzed, collected between 2003 and 2007, which include information on 819 people who retired between waves and 636 people who remained in employment. It is argued that on the one hand, the time that comes available after retirement is beneficial to health, while on the other hand retirement can represent a relief from demanding work. Conditional change ordered logistic analyses show that indeed, retirement is beneficial for health, but this is largely relative to those who stay in employment, who experience a decline in health. Further, the largest health gains are for those with psychologically stressful jobs. No such support is found for physically demanding jobs. Strengths, limitations, and implications of the study are discussed.

Different types of measures for health yield different results for outcomes of retirement; pre-retirement job demands play an important role in how retirement affects health; physical demands seem primarily related to physical health benefits, psychological demands seem primarily related to mental health benefits.

This study quantitatively explores the understudied topic of retirement rituals, what factors influence them, and how the experience of such rites of passage may affect postretirement satisfaction with life (SWL). Various regression techniques are applied to 2 waves of Dutch panel data gathered among 832 retirees. Retirement rituals were measured in 2 ways: via the perceived effort put into the ritual, and via details regarding the presentation of a retirement gift. SWL was assessed through 3 questions of the typical scale. The findings provide evidence that functioning and social connectedness at work positively, and involuntary retirement negatively influence the extensiveness of retirement rituals. These outcomes imply that it is embeddedness at work rather than hierarchal position that shapes retirement rituals. The most important finding is that the experienced retirement ritual is positively associated to postretirement SWL, and mostly so for those who perceive themselves a highly competent in their work. No such interaction was found for retirement anxiety. Although the observed connection between retirement rituals and SWL is not large, this finding is important for employers, employees, and policy makers when considering farewell ceremonies and the rules and customs that surround them, and warrants further research into this relationship.