Retirement, a milestone of old age: reviewing recent psychosocial approaches

Abstract

Retirement is a fairly interesting transition phenomenon in terms of the possibilities and adaptation tasks it entails for those who go through it. This work consists of a review of recent literature on the subject. The corpus of literature analyzed is made up by articles reporting empirical research on psychosocial aspects of retirement, published from 2006 to 2012. Results stress the abundance of studies related to wellness and satisfaction with retirement, as well as research regarding decision making processes, especially as far as early retirement is concerned. Changes regarding the growth of an aged population that lead governments and organizations to consider measures for delaying retirement also stand out. The review presents some theoretical approaches used in the studies and discuses some necessities and guidelines to tackle the study of retirement from the point view point of psychosocial development in its broadest sense.