Also, many countries public pension programs and/or pensions for public employees are increasingly in peril. The United States is another example of that with public pensions getting more and more insolvent and their Social Security and Medicare programs hemorrhaging money quite quickly with many pundits saying that the programs will run out of money in 1-3 decades at best. Other countries like Canada and much of Europe are having much the same problem in their own ways.
However, this study does have a lot going for it. First, they did the study over an entire decade and they surveyed a lot of people for the study. There were 25,000 responses and about 4,500 were included in the final results according to the "what you should know" section on the first page of the article. The time horizon and the size of the study are both very good in terms of size and length so those are major pluses for this study (Schellenberg & Silver, 2004).
One downside is that getting into "preferences" and other fairly gray areas can be fairly problematic in research because viewpoints can change by the month, the week or even the year. Things can change overnight. Perhaps a lot of that was absolved by the fact that the study was done over such a long time horizon but the fickleness of the study respondents as well as the possibility that they are themselves conflicted and unsure about the opinions they are offering is something that cannot be ignored (Schellenberg & Silver, 2004).
Put another way, research that is clearly at least partly qualitative in nature is very dangerous because anecdotes and other non-qualitative opinions and stories are...
The study being reviewed here used a very large sample size but that does not eliminate all of the potential problems. One major issue is an effective translation between opinions and viewpoints and the facets of logic and common sense (Schellenberg & Silver, 2004).
The point started above is to say that some people make mind-numbingly bad decisions as it relates to retirement and the like. Pensions and other financial arms that are insufficient to completely inadequate are often relied upon way too much. Also, people lamenting that they are just now reaching their upper earnings capacity while at the same time talking retirement is quite vexing. Either someone wants to keep working or they do not. Sure, having a pension providing income is nice but a pension is not meant to replace what could be earned if one keeps working and it should not be treated or considered as such (Schellenberg & Silver, 2004).
Conclusion
In the end, the study was quite good for the time horizon that was its focus but it can also be said (and should be said) that applying a study that is admittedly a decade long and the end of that decade was itself more than a decade ago, that means that roughly a generation has passed, 21 years in total as of the writing of this response, since the end of that study and that is greatly limiting into how much should be read into that study's results in today's economic, social, cultural and international context (Schellenberg & Silver, 2004)
References
Schellenberg, G., & Silver, C. (2004). You can't always get what you want:…
