Retirement

Retirement is a general term that has traditionally referred to older adults’ disengagement from the workforce. As an area of research inquiry, it is a broad concept that has been studied by a number of disciplines, including economics, gerontology, and organizational behavior, as well as developmental and industrial and organizational psychology. Appropriately, these fields have offered many different perspectives on the concept of disengagement. Some frame it in terms of the amount of participation in the workforce (i.e., the number of hours worked), whereas others frame it in terms of the receipt of pensions as a source of income rather than paid work. Still other fields focus on disengagement as a form of commitment to and reliance on work as a source of personal identity ...