title: Profiling plans for retirement.
abstract: Actual decision making for retirement is largely inaccessible to investigation, yet research can focus on plans as a window into the preretirement process. This article proposes a construct that profiles five generic types of retirement plans, including plans to retire completely, change jobs, never retire, and uncertainty about retirement. The heuristic value of the construct lies in its recognition of the heterogeneity of retirement intentions. The five plan types were operationalized among workers aged 51-61 in the 1992 Health and Retirement Study. Convergent validity was demonstrated by comparisons to analogous survey questions. Construct validity was shown by predictable relationships between intentions and elements of workers' opportunity structure. The retirement-plans construct can serve as the foundation for a taxonomy of specific retirement plans (e.g., about timing, employment), to organize research on stability and change in retirement intentions, and characterize the path dependence of eventual retirement behavior.
authors.affiliation: Center on Aging, University of Kansas Medical Center, USA. dekerdt@kumc.edu
authors.forename: D J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Ekerdt
authors.forename: S
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: DeViney
authors.forename: K
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Kosloski
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D000368:Aged; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D003657:Decision Making; D004651:Employment; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D017533:Marital Status; D008875:Middle Aged; D009790:Occupations; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012179:Retirement / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires