Series details: CRDA/27

The data consists of a study undertaken at the request of the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS), and the Department of Employment (DE) to find out why people retire early, at normal retirement age, or after, and to investigate constraints on working after or just before normal retirement age as well as the effects of various personal, environmental and policy factors on the timing of the decision to retire or the failure to take such a decision.

The Reasons for Retirement Dataset was a study undertaken at the request of, and sponsored by, the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) and the Department of Employment (DE). The investigation was done by the Social Survey Division of the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys. The dataset was deposited at the Department of Social Policy and Administration at the Economic and Social Research Council Data Archive, University of Essex in 1982 by the Department of Health and Social Security and David Piachaud, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). It was subsequently deposited at NDAD in 2000.

The survey collected data from a random sample, which was the result of a stratified random sample from a postal sift, of retired people and those who continued working after normal retiring age. It consisted of men aged 55-72 and women aged 50-72 in Great Britain. It included data on constraints on working after or just before normal retirement, and effects of various personal, policy and environmental factors on timing of retirement. For further information see the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, and see Links to dataset catalogues.

No accruals are expected.

The Reasons for Retirement dataset and related dataset documentation are public records under the Public Records Acts 1958 and 1967. The Public Record Office has assigned this dataset the class reference BN 93.

Access to the Reasons for Retirement Database and its related documentation is open to users of NDAD.

The Reasons for Retirement dataset and related dataset documentation are subject to Crown Copyright.

The Reasons for Retirement dataset is not subject to registration under the Data Protection Act.

The language of the materials is English.

Documents relating to the Reasons for Retirement dataset has been transferred to NDAD. See Dataset Documentation Catalogue.

The Reasons for Retirement dataset is also held at the UK Data Archive, and has been given the reference number 1134.

Unknown.

Unknown.

Unknown.

The dataset was transferred to the Essex Data Archive in 1980 in ASCII on 9-track tape (labelled, fixed-length record text files of 80 characters, 10 records per block). The data was transferred to NDAD as four fixed length text files.

The Reasons for Retirement dataset is closed in that once the data was entered it was archived and not subsequently overwritten by other data.

Data was collected by means of face-to-face interview with the use of questionnaires. Hole count summaries were done on certain sub-samples. See Dataset Documentation Catalogue, references CRDA/27/DD/1, CRDA/27/DD/2 and CRDA/27/DD/4/2 for further information.

Details of the content and transformation validation checks performed by NDAD on the Reasons for Retirement dataset are contained in the catalogues of individual datasets: see Links to dataset catalogues.

Dataset catalogues provide more detailed information about individual datasets, and are currently available for the following dataset(s):