Retirees Are Also Stratified: Pre-Retirement Socio-Occupational
Status and the Well-Being of Older Adults in Central Europe
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Czech Academy of Sciences
Submission date: 2020-09-01
Acceptance date: 2020-12-03
Publication date: 2021-03-22
Polish Sociological Review 2021;213(1):27-46
KEYWORDS
ABSTRACT
Most stratification research concerns solely the economically active population and omits inactive seniors.
Retirees are often treated as a separate and rather homogeneous social category. However, this approach is
only partially valid. Retirees can still be differentiated in regard to their objective and subjective well-being, which
is linked to their former occupations. Using large EU-SILC datasets for Central European countries, this article
focuses on the effect of pre-retirement socio-occupational category on the well-being of retirees. The category is
found to be an important explanatory variable after controlling for age, sex, marital status, and other characteristics.
However, there are substantial differences among countries. While in Czechia, retirees are most homogeneous
in regard to their objective and subjective well-being across socio-occupational categories, the differences
are considerably larger in Hungary and Poland, and on a similar level as in our benchmark country, Austria.
FUNDING
This work was supported by grant no. 18-09220S “Social Stratification in the Czech Republic and Central Europe: 1968–2018” from the Czech Science Foundation. The EU-SILC datasets were made available on the basis of contract RPP 247/2019-EU-SILC-HBS between the European Commission, Eurostat, and the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences.