Abstract
This paper examines the impact of retirement on people’s subjective quality of life, as expressed by their levels of happiness and loneliness, in Poland. We analysed five waves of the Social Diagnosis panel survey conducted between 2007 and 2015. To account for unobserved individual heterogeneity, we employed fixed effects ordered logit models and fixed effect logistic models for the panel data. We found that the respondents’ happiness levels did not change after they retired, and that the introduction of interactions between retirement and employment did not alter these findings. However, the results of the loneliness model showed that the probability of being lonely increased among males after retirement. Second, the outcomes of interactions between retirement and employment suggested that not working after retirement increased the likelihood of being lonely among men, whereas engaging in bridge employment decreased the chances of being lonely among men. These findings may indicate that combining retirement with employment may be a source of social interaction, which can provide protection against loneliness, and which may, in turn, be positively related to other factors (i.e., subjective quality of life, health status, and mortality).
Highlights
Health 2021, 18, 9875. https://Retirement is one of the major life events that affects people’s subjective quality of life/subjective well-being (SWB)
We focused on the last phase in order to gain a better understanding of how transitioning to retirement affects an older person’s subjective quality of life, as approximated by the happiness level and loneliness
A, we introduced separate variables describing retirement status and employment status, while in Model B, we incorporated the interactions between those variables in order to account for the differences between individuals who continued working after retirement
Summary
Retirement is one of the major life events that affects people’s subjective quality of life/subjective well-being (SWB). Intensive research on this topic has been conducted, the evidence on the impact of retirement on life satisfaction has been mixed [1]. Retirement has been analysed from different angles, with many scholars investigating the effect of retirement on an individual’s subjective quality of life. As van Solinge and Henkens noted, researchers usually adopt an individualistic approach to studying retirement, even though it can be perceived as an occupational career transition but as a family transition that is experienced by couples [2]. For example, investigate whether it is voluntary (e.g., [3]), whether a retiree takes up bridge employment [4], and whether an individual retired at the regular statutory age or early [5].
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