Retirement Adjustment in the Pandemic – Did Risk- and Protective Factors Change??

The transition to retirement often coincides with changes in important aspects of daily life and social roles. This can be a demanding experience for some retirees, affecting their mental health. It is thus important to identify relevant predictors of the adjustment quality. Retiring during the COVID-19 pandemic may have been particularly challenging, as newly retired older adults had fewer opportunities to establish new leisure activities and social relationships due to limitations on in-person meetings and travel. Our study is based on the German Ageing Survey, a longitudinal multi-cohort survey of Germans aged 40 and older. Here, we included two groups: Workers retiring during or just before the first wave of the pandemic (2019-early 2021, n = 175) versus workers retiring long before the pandemic (2015–2017, n = 211). We compared both groups in terms of retirement adjustment, measured by perceived adjustment difficulty (in 2017 for the control group and in 2020/21 for the COVID-19 group) and change in life satisfaction across the transition (2014–2017 or 2017–2020/21, respectively). We further investigated whether pre-retirement engagement in social activities, generalized self-efficacy, online activities or disease load were associated with adjustment. Groups did not differ in their retirement adjustment. A higher generalized self-efficacy was associated with better adjustment. Social activities before retirement were only associated with increases in life satisfaction among those retiring before the pandemic. We discuss our findings with respect to the literature on predictors of retirement adjustment, as well as on the effects of the pandemic on psychosocial functioning.