Dissonance between predicted and actual retirement statuses to address heterogeneous effects of retirement on mental health; evidence from JSTAR

Wakako Misawa^1*Hideki Hashimoto²

• ¹Graduate School of Medicine, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
• ²Department of Health and Social Behavior, School of Public Health, University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

Introduction: Many studies have explored the relationship between retirement and health outcomes but findings are inconsistent, mainly owing to endogeneity in the relationship between retirement decisions and health, and the effect of heterogeneity across retiree attributes. Recent studies indicate that the mental health effects of retirement vary according to the volitionality of retirement choices taking an exogenous shock as an instrument. In this study, we proposed an alternative strategy to address retirement volitionality and effect heterogeneity using social comparison and cognitive dissonance theories, to treat the dissonance between retirement propensity and actual choice behavior. Methods: A cross-sectional analysis was conducted using data for 1,544 Japanese men aged 60–75 years derived from the Japanese Study of Aging and Retirement. Drawing on social comparison and cognitive dissonance theories, we hypothesized that an individual’s preferred retirement status could be proxied by the predicted likelihood of retirement status determined in the reference population, and regarded the discrepancy between predicted and actual retirement status as the dissonance status of the retirement decision. The predicted retirement status was inferred from the retirement propensity estimated using a logistic regression model that included variables identified in previous studies as associated with retirement. By comparing predicted and actual retirement status, participants were categorized into four groups as follows: “predicted not-retired and actually not-retired” (PN-AN), “predicted retired and actually retired” (PR-AR), “predicted not-retired but actually retired” (PN-AR), and “predicted retired but actually not-retired” (PR-AN). We investigated between-group differences in the prevalence of depressive symptoms using logistic regression analysis. Results: Compared with PN and AN individuals, those who were actually retired regardless of their predicted status had higher odds ratios for depressive symptoms (1.91 [95% confidence interval: 1.16–3.12] for PR-AR and 1.84 [1.17–2.91] for PN-AR). The results were robust after adjusting for health conditions and social participation. Discussion: Our findings indicate that retirement per se was related to depressive symptoms but dissonance between actual and predicted retirement statuses did not modify this association.