With the trend toward early retirement and the fact that people are living to an older average age, more years of an individual's life will be spent in retirement. To examine personal values as psychological determinants of the retirement preparation process, 206 classified university employees, between the ages of 50 and 65 years of age,…

Successful phased retirement plans enable senior faculty to ease into retirement, relieve financial pressures on participating institutions, and permit upward mobility for junior faculty. Responses from 62 of the 72 land-grant institutions in the United States and Puerto Rico reveal that 11 had implemented plans that enable individuals between a…

The marital relationship is a basic context of retirement, where spouses' separate perceptions of retirement, and of each other's views, are an essential part of the retirement experience. To explore this issue, 297 married men who had been retired for 6 years or less, all participants in the Veterans Administration Normative Aging Study, reported…

Survey data based on a random sample of retirement villages' residents in Florida (N=519) considered retirement plans. Individuals were more likely to have made detailed plans for: Health Insurance (85 percent); Income (71 percent); Will (70 percent); Housing (67 percent); Health Care (55 percent); Leisure Pursuits (39 percent). A retirement…

A problem with gerontology theory is that it focuses on a social view of the aged, ignoring individual and cultural variables. A person is judged to have aged successfully if he has adjusted to society's definition of an "elderly person." Similarly, most studies of programs and options for the aged reflect the view of the service…

Interviews conducted with 31 older, retired adults in Dortmund, West Germany, concerning their use of cable television and its effect on their everyday lives are the focal point of this qualitative study. Also discussed is a quantitative study of a larger sample of German citizens over age 14 in the same geographic area before cable television was…

Community-based educational programs for older adults are difficult to evaluate due to randomization and control factors. In order to investigate, under a quasi-experimental research design, the contribution of an educational program on retirement issues to participants' quality of life, and to study the program enrollment patterns, 21 people…

Age grading, the differentiation of social groups by members' age judgments, is widely regarded to be a universal aspect of social life. Most studies have examined age structurally (demographically), rather than normatively (modally). This study presents survey data measuring employees' age judgments of managerial careers collected from an…

An amended form of the Older American's Status and Needs Assessment Questionnaire assessed the prevalence of adjustment, as measured by the Bradburn Affect Scale, in a random stratified sample of 301 female and 140 male elderly rural residents in Allegany County, New York. The relationship between adjustment and biosocial, demographic, social, and…