Subjective retirement.

An individual's identification of his retirement situation does not necessarily coincide with the retirement concept as defined by objective measures. Self-evaluation of retirement status by respondents to the Retirement History Study has been analyzed to discover to what extent their subjective assessment of retirement matched the situation predicted by objective measures. For those completely retired or not retired, the self-evaluation was closely related to the number of hours worked. A "partly retired" response was not as well-predicted, to some extent because of definitional problems. Pension receipt and, to a lesser degree, aging had some significance as predictors, but other demographic and attitudinal factors were not significant. Analysis of the partly retired suggests the relative importance of gradual retirement during the period 1969--75.