Retirement Dilemmas and Decisions

Individuals/couples in their fifties, sixties, and early seventies are making strategic selections regarding retirement: its nature, timing, and sequence, including how to spend time. Dilemmas constraining their options result from demographic, economic, and technological forces; structural lag in institutions and templates; social structures (age, gender, socioeconomic status, race, country) shaping the cumulation of advantages or disadvantages that have resulted from prior work, family, and health trajectories and transitions; the fact that unprecedented numbers of women and couples are increasingly facing retirement; and individuals' own situational exigencies (including caring for infi rm relatives). Even as older workers and retirees are healthier and better educated than ever before in history, there are no institutionalized paths offering new options for ongoing but less-than full-time public engagement. Scholars have yet to capture the impacts of these forces reshaping decision-making (and health outcomes) in this emerging phase of adulthood.