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The Search for Happiness: Work Experiences and Quality of Life of Older Taiwanese Men

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Abstract

Taiwan’s pension systems do not always ensure corresponding benefits for those who have achieved their career goals in labor markets, thus retirement decisions are often difficult for the majority of its citizens. Retirement is not only a social institution shaped by labor market and social welfare policy, but also a process affected by personal life chance and family situations, and therefore influences their citizen’s well-being. While scholars have maintained that retirees’ happiness is related to earlier life experiences, there is little empirical evidence that explains this relationship. This paper investigates the midlife work experiences and the resources workers acquired to determine the extent to which they affect the happiness of retirees. Data for examining study hypotheses are drawn from four waves of the Taiwan Longitudinal Survey on Aging. The results indicate that midlife work experiences exert significant influences on life satisfaction, and also play a moderate role on the relationship between seniors’ resources and their life satisfaction. Bridge employment is found to have varying effects on seniors’ life satisfaction depending on their occupation. We conclude that the happiness of older Taiwanese men is mainly a product of both their present situations and their recollections of their earlier occupational experiences.

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Notes

  1. The dataset used in this paper is the most recent one released by the Survey Research Data Archive in Taiwan (https://srda.sinica.edu.tw/news/index_en), although the Taiwan government has conducted a follow-up survey in 2011.

  2. We also estimate the random intercepts and slopes model allowing the intercepts and slopes of time-varied variables to vary across individuals. However, the fitness of random intercepts and slopes model is not better than the random intercepts model.

  3. We perform estimates of all the interactive effects between middle-age work experiences and economic status, health status, social support, and attitude toward retirement. Only significant effects in Model 4 are shown in Table 3.

  4. The TSLA Life Satisfaction Index is adapted from Neugarten et al.’s (1961) Life Satisfaction Index A (LSIA).

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the grants of Ministry of Science and Technology: a post-doctoral grant to Li-Hsueh Wu, and a research project grant to Ruey-Ming Tsay. Many thanks to the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions, and to Ching-Li Yang and Wei-Pang Wang for their valuable comments on the manuscripts. The data were drawn from Taiwan Longitudinal Survey on Aging (TSLA), conducted by the Health Promotion Administration, Ministry of Health and Welfare. The dataset is available from the Survey Research Data Archive, Academia Sinica.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Tunghai University, Taichung, Taiwan

    Li-Hsueh Wu & Ruey-Ming Tsay

  2. Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan

    Ruey-Ming Tsay

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  1. Li-Hsueh Wu
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Wu, LH., Tsay, RM. The Search for Happiness: Work Experiences and Quality of Life of Older Taiwanese Men. Soc Indic Res 136, 1031–1051 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-016-1531-y

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