Hypothesis

This research explores the hypothesis that males and females differ in their preferred retirement ages.

Introduction

The age at which a person chooses to stop working is a person’s retirement age. Ideally, this is the age at which a person has already accumulated enough personal wealth to live the rest of his or her life off of that wealth at a standard of living that is acceptable to the person. While a country usually has a set mandatory age for retirement, this age does not necessarily coincide with the age that people actually want to retire. That is, there are some people who want to retire much earlier than the mandatory retirement age in order for them to be able to use the time that they will have to enjoy other things that they want to do in life. On the other hand, there are people who want to work even past the mandatory retirement age, as they love their work and want to keep on doing it for the rest of their lives.

Males and females often differ in many things, from their taste in clothing to their preferences in movie genres. As such, this study considers the question of whether or not males and females differ when it comes to their preferred retirement ages. The dependent variable for this research is the preferred retirement age. This is defined as a ratio scale variable measured in age-years. That is, a person can give his or her preferred retirement age by answering the question: At what age do you want to retire? On the other hand, gender is considered as the independent variable in this study. Gender is defined as a nominal scale variable with two possible responses: male or female.

Data Collection Method

In order to be able to utilize statistical data analysis for this research, a random sample of individuals who are currently working needed to be selected (Frankfort-Nachmias & Nachmias 184). Furthermore, since age is a factor that may inadvertently affect the outcomes of the study (that is, current age may affect preferred retirement age), the study is limited to the population of working people aged 25 to 30 who currently reside in the metropolitan area where the researcher resides. A telephone directory that has residential listings of people who are living in the metropolitan area is selected as the sampling frame for this study. That is, members of the sample are selected from choosing entries from the telephone directory. Although this means that there is some sampling bias since people who are not listed in the directory would not be included in the analysis, this is accepted in exchange for the ability to draw a considerably random sample representing the metropolitan population. The members of the sample are elected by generating a random numbers using Microsoft Excel. The telephone directory has 725 pages with around 600 entries per page. The formula =round(rand()*724+1, 0) is used to determine what page will be used and the formula =round(rand()*599+1,0) is used to determine what entry in that page will be called. This process is repeated until 40 people fitting the criteria (working and aged 25-30) have responded to the telephone survey questions. There are two telephone survey questions that were asked from each respondent. These questions are:

• What is your age?
• Are you currently employed?
• What is your gender?
• At what age do you want to retire?

Permission was first asked from the person who answered the phone if he or she would like to participate in a survey study for a school project. If the answers for the first or second question did not fit the criteria, the respondent was thanked and the call was ended. If the answers to both questions fit the criteria, the respondent was asked the other two questions. All of the complete and valid responses were encoded in a Microsoft Excel Worksheet.

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