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Cross-National Differences in Goals for Retirement: the Case of India and the United States

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Abstract

In the present investigation, a comparison is made between the retirement goals of working Indian adults and previously published data on the retirement goals of working adults in the United States. Participants were 158 Indian respondents between 21 and 60 years of age. Each respondent completed a questionnaire in which they reported the nature of the goals they held for retirement. For the most part, the types of the goals enumerated by workers from India were similar to those of Americans. However, Indians were found to focus more on financial stability and self-related goals, whereas Americans tended to focus on leisure and exploration activities. Moreover, Indian workers reported fewer retirement goals and their goals were less concrete than those reported by Americans. Findings are discussed in terms of the way culturally-based differences and similarities in retirement systems can impact some aspects of future goals (e.g., frequency; concreteness), but not other aspects of goal structures (e.g., goal content).

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Notes

  1. The decisions to use computer-based goal elicitation procedures and email/snowball sampling in this study were made for pragmatic reasons—to facilitate the efficiency with which data could be collected. It was believed that differences in goal elicitation procedures between this investigation and the Hershey et al. (2002) study would not differentially bias the findings. However, the sampling method employed in this study likely resulted in a broader representation of Indians from across the country, relative to the more regional sampling that took place in the U.S. For that reason, any observed differences in goal content found across studies could be due to differences in sampling approaches—a rival hypothesis that cannot be dismissed.

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Acknowledgments

The authors are indebted to Daniel Pearce, Jighyasu Gaur, and two anonymous reviewers for critical comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. The second author is also grateful to the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (NIAS), which provided support for the development of this article.

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Correspondence to Douglas A. Hershey.

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Gupta, R., Hershey, D.A. Cross-National Differences in Goals for Retirement: the Case of India and the United States. J Cross Cult Gerontol 31, 221–236 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10823-016-9298-9

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