Abstract

Research on values has focused almost exclusively on samples of university students and working adults and is significantly lacking for older, retired adults. The general focus of this dissertation is on extending research on values to older adults and to the post-employment stage of life using a sample of 433 recently retired individuals from the Montreal area. The dissertation is divided into three separate studies, presented as individual manuscripts. The first of these is focused on the structural and measurement properties of a widely used value questionnaire (the Portrait Value Questionnaire: Schwartz et al., 2001) that has seen little use with older adults. The second study examines how values, health, and money, independently and in combination, are longitudinally linked with affective well-being in retirement. The third study investigates subjective perceptions of value change compared to longitudinally-assessed value change over three years of retirement and the extent to which these different kinds of change are adaptive processes linked to positive and negative affect and meaning in life. The major areas of interest in the dissertation (values, retirement, subjective well-being, and value change) are reviewed in a general introduction, followed by the three manuscripts. Finally, an integrative discussion of the findings across the three studies is presented