The Impact of Husbands' Retirement on Wives' Marital Quality

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recent studies view retirement as a family transition that affects others in the close family circle, as well as the retiree, and is a process that occurs over time, and not as a single event. It therefore behooves us to learn more about how husbands' retirement affects the women with whom male retirees share their lives. Furthermore, most previous research has studied the wives of retirees using cross-sectional designs. In general, findings have indicated that husbands' retirement has little effect on wives' marital quality. This study is an advance over much of the previous research in that we use a longitudinal design. We have examined wives' assessments of marital quality including contextual life changes before their husbands' retirements, and have compared the assessments of the same wives following their husbands' retirements. To study these phenomena, we used data from the Normative Aging Study, administering the DAS to 61 wives prior and subsequent to husbands' retirement. We used means of the DAS scores and sub-scale scores at baseline and compared these scores at Time 2 by paired t-test. Positive change in the “cohesion” sub-scale of wives' DAS scores before to after husbands' retirement suggests that shared activities increased after retirement, and that the increase was pleasing to the wives. Multiple regression analysis found that income change, and change in husbands' health contributed most to marital quality change among wives, with changes in wives' employment status also contributing. To specify retirement-context conditions including the subscales of satisfaction, cohesion, consensus and affection, additional multiple regression models indicated continuity in wives' marital quality scores pre-to post-husbands' retirement. Implications of the findings for practice and future research are discussed.