Who Retires Well and Under What Conditions? The Role of Resources and Contexts in Predicting Retirement Well-Being Trajectories

Advancements in medicine, lifestyle improvements, and increased societal supports have made retirement a life period when people can experience unprecedented levels of subjective well-being, colloquially known as happiness. Researchers have found that retirement conditions, such as the degree of control and timing of the retirement and the extent to which individuals are financially prepared to retire, influence people's long-term subjective well-being patterns. However, as people age and transition out of work, they utilize health, psychological, and social resources prior to retirement to adjust to the changes and challenges encountered during the transition to retirement. There are only a handful of empirical works that have examined the influence these antecedent resources have in predicting people's long-term well-being, and none of these studies have examined the unique contribution of these different kinds of resources and whether they moderate the influence of retirement conditions. To address this gap, this study examined in the Americans' Changing Lives Study, a nationally representative sample of US adults, how preretirement resources and retirement conditions work in concert to predict people's subjective well-being trajectories. Growth mixture modeling results revealed four distinct well-being trajectories from preretirement to postretirement: a) maintenance/stable high well-being (steady prosper trajectory), b) maintenance/stable low well-being (steady languish trajectory), c) increase in well-being (retirement recovery trajectory), and d) decrease in well-being (retirement decline trajectory). Logistic regression results revealed that people who experienced a favorable degree of control over retirement, and who had more preretirement psychological (self-efficacy and self-mastery) resources were more likely to be on a steady prosper trajectory than all other trajectories. Additionally, people on the steady prosper and retirement recovery trajectories were combined to represent people who were retiring well, and people on steady languish and retirement decline trajectories were combined to represent people who were not adjusting well to retirement. Results consistently showed that people who experienced a favorable degree of control over retirement, who were more financially prepared to retire, and who had more preretirement psychological and social (care and support) resources were more likely to be on a retiring well than retiring poorly trajectory. Results are discussed to inform researchers and practitioners affiliated with social programs of the preretirement resources and retirement conditions that influence well-being for a diverse population of retired people. The reality is that people enter retirement under different circumstances and with varying amounts of resources. This study is the first to combine the resource-based retirement adjustment framework with the positive developmental psychology perspective to understand the role retirement conditions and preretirement resources play in predicting people's subjective well-being trajectories. More importantly, this study helps foster an understanding of the antecedent psychosocial factors that diminish and promote people's long-term well-being in retirement.