Boundaries of the Construct of Unemployment in the Preretirement Years: Exploring an Expanded Measurement of Lost-Work Opportunity

Abstract

There is uncertainty related to whether retirement negatively affects health—possibly due to complexity around retirement decisions. Lost-work opportunity through unemployment or forced retirement has been shown to negatively affect health. Lost-work opportunity can be captured in two measurement fields, either a reported experience of being forced into retirement or reported unemployment. However, 17% of individuals retiring due to the loss of work opportunity identified in qualitative interviewing (i.e., unemployment, temporary lay-offs, company buy-outs, forced relocations, etc.) do not report this unemployment or involuntary retirement in quantitative survey responses. We propose broadening the conceptualization of late-career unemployment to incorporate other lost work opportunity scenarios. Using the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a lost-work opportunity score (LOS) was computed from items indicating unemployment and forced or unplanned retirement. Correlations were computed between this LOS and all continuous variables in the RAND longitudinal compilation of the HRS to determine its convergent and discriminant validity. The LOS demonstrated a Chronbach’s alpha of α = .82 and had convergent validity with constructs of employment (9 variables), finances (36 variables), and health (14 variables), as predicted by the literature on retirement timing. No other continuous variables in the HRS were identified with a moderate or strong correlation to LOS, demonstrating discriminant validity. Further research should explore whether a combination of variables in the HRS can improve the accuracy of measuring lost-work opportunity. Improved precision in measurement, through an expanded conceptualization of lost-work opportunity, may help explicate the retirement-related factors that affect health, to inform policy and support healthy aging decisions at a societal level.

Disparate Disruptions: Intersectional COVID-19 Employment Effects by Age, Gender, Education, and Race/Ethnicity

“…These unprecedented times have enormous implications for individual work lives, labor-market policies and practices, and public safety nets. They may also challenge how we measure employment and unemployment opportunities and constraints ( Hyde & Dingermans, 2017 ; Voss, Snih, Li, Hung, Richards, 2020 ). Our findings on NILF-other suggests the need for thinking about and studying who at different ages and life stages are essentially a type of discouraged worker, dropping out of the workforce in the face of the COVID downturn and thus not captured in unemployment statistics.…”

Career management.

“…We urge that researchers need to discover more individual and organizational strategies that can effectively combat ageism. Szinovacz and Davey (2005) found that nearly 30% of participants in their study reported forced retirement, and this experience was found to be detrimental to employees' health (Rhee et al, 2016;Voss et al, 2020), financial well-being (Heisig & Radl, 2017), and life satisfaction (Dingemans & Henkens, 2014). Involuntary retirement often results from personal or environmental constraints such as health conditions, care obligations, job displacement, or discriminative practices (Szinovacz & Davey, 2005).…”

Costs of Forced Retirement

“…National survey tools assessing health and retirement ask about forced retirement decisions but do not adequately capture when older workers are nudged out of the labor force. 16 Unraveling the potential health effects for this population begins with better measurement.…”

“…Mixed-methods comparisons of survey to interviews data found that 17% of individuals who marked retirement as voluntary revealed multiple elements of forced retirement timing in interviews (i.e., retirement prompted by unemployment, temporary layoffs, company buy-outs, workforce reductions, or forced relocations). 16,17 A deep dive into the Health and Retirement Study data on earlier than planned retirements found 27% of early retirements were still unexplained after adjusting for multiple factors like health change, family situations, and caregiving. 18 Measuring this phenomenon is difficult, particularly in cases where retirement is the best choice between bad options.…”