Ryan Fehr’s research while affiliated with Trinity Washington University and other places

The Oxford Handbook of Retirement offers comprehensive, up-to-date, and forward-thinking summaries of contemporary knowledge on retirement, especially the important progress that has been made in the field over the past two decades. The approach taken spans human resource management, organizational psychology, development psychology, gerontology, sociology, public health, and economics. Chapters provide conceptualizations of retirement from multiple disciplines; existing theoretical perspectives and research findings on retirement, including adult development, career development, organizational and management, and economic perspectives; current and future challenges in retirement research and practice; and recommendations and suggestions for prospective areas of research.

In their recent and insightful article on adjustment among retirees, Wang, Henkens, and van Solinge (see record 2011-03465-001) provided a comprehensive review of current theorizing on the antecedents of employees’ postretirement well-being. Central to their review is a resource-based model, which conceptualizes retirement as a stress-inducing role transition that requires significant pools of resources to overcome. Prototypical of the resource paradigm are examinations of how monetary resources allow retirees to overcome financial stressors and how familial connections allow retirees to overcome emotional stressors. Despite the explanatory power of Wang et al.’s model, a broader perspective on role transitions suggests that retirement might not always be inherently stressful. Viewed from the perspective of the creative personality, employees may in fact experience retirement as a self-actualizing event that enhances well-being through the provision of desired novelty. Existing empirical evidence on individual difference predictors of role transitions provides preliminary support for this perspective, suggesting that while retirement is often stressful it can also be an energizing and fulfilling experience. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)