Determinants of healthy ageing in work and retirement: a cross-national longitudinal study based on the IDEAR network

Retirement is a major turning point in life, when financial and social circumstances may change substantially. These changes may have a large impact on the health of older people. In recent years, the transition from working life to post-working life has become much less standardised than it was in the past. The effects of retirement are likely to be different depending on when and how people retire, as well as how they are able to adapt to life in retirement. Additionally, the effects of retirement may be influenced both by working conditions during the last years before retirement as well as by the social and socioeconomic conditions in retirement - including factors such as income from pensions, home ownership, as well as family structure and social networks outside of work. Health-related behaviours, such as exercise, diet, and sleeping patterns, are also likely to be important factors influencing health after retirement. We propose to investigate how all these factors in later working life, during the retirement transition, and in early retirement influence for how long older individuals are able to live actively and healthily. This will be done using well-established large studies on ageing and registry data from five European countries representing three different welfare regimes and spanning up to several decades of the middle years in work, retirement, early old age and the beginning of old-old age. The key questions that this proposed research seeks to address are:

What impact does retirement and other reasons for leaving employment have on the health and health behaviours of older people?

Do different patterns of retirement, such as prolonged working life versus early retirement, have different effects on the health and health behaviours of older people?

What are the processes during working life and the retirement transition that might contribute to poor health in later life?

Do these relationships between retirement patterns and health differ in different European countries?

We will publicise our research findings by issuing press releases when papers are published to maximise media coverage.

We anticipate that the proposed research will be of interest to policy makers, including Department of Work and Pensions, Department of Health, and Health and Safety Executive. We will arrange at least one policy seminar in the second or third year of the project to inform policymakers of our key findings. This will follow the successful format used for the symposium jointly organised by the ESRC funded research seminar series on sickness absence (SARC) research group and the Government Office for the English Regions (GOER).

In addition, we will feed into relevant calls or respond to requests for information. We already have contact with relevant policy makers and organisations including Dame Carol Black, National Director for Health and Work and the UK Health and Safety Executive.