Examining Young Adults’ Expectations for Retirement: An Emerging Tension

Anticipatory communication about retirement is often described as a culminating career stage–one that is reached after working for many years. Although not solely an age-based organizational process, chronological age is often tied to conceptualizations of retirement through communicative means. In this project we seek to understand how young adults (members of the Millennial and Generation Z cohorts) integrate anticipatory socialization messages about age and retirement, especially given dynamic and varied conceptualizations of these constructs. To do so participant created drawings (PCD) and qualitative survey responses were collected that asked participants to explicate their perceptions of retirement and aging. We analyzed the data using a thematic approach and uncovered an overarching tension between perceptions of age and retirement that was communicated using positive and negative orientations. In addition to providing insights into what counts as a “real retirement”, these findings also inform a set of conceptual and methodological contributions that underscore the need for a more complex approach to communicating about retirement.