Family Life Course and the Timing of Women’s Retirement – a Sequence Analysis Approach

Based on longitudinal data from national Swedish registers, family life course dynamics for all women born in 1935 in Sweden are explored for the period 1990–2006. Focusing primarily on the existence and geographical proximity to parents, children, and grandchildren, assuming that the family life courses affect the life situation as well as strategic decisions, this longitudinal study uses a holistic approach, analysing how different types of family life courses are associated with socio-economic conditions as well as with the timing of retirement. The primary task was not to identify the causal determinants of work life exit but rather to unfold how retirement transition is entwined into the different types of family life courses, whereby retirement and family ageing are different sides of a multifaceted transition period. By using sequence analysis, the family life courses were structured into sequences and durations of states and different family life course categories were identified. The sequence analyses reveal a complex relation between retirement decisions and having family members around. Early retirement was associated with a category with few relatives but also with a category with two younger generations present, while we found no strong association with early retirement for categories in which the old generation was around for a longer period. Late retirement was associated with belonging to categories * Correspondence to: Ingrid Svensson, Department of Statistics, Umeå School of Business and Economics, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden. E-mail: [email protected]