Profiles and expectations of seniors to achieve a successful retirement - the PEPE cohort study

Introduction Despite the acceptance that retirement is not a uniform process and is marked by individual factors, and after initiatives such as the Decade of Healthy Aging promoted by the UN, which consider older people as the central focus of all actions aimed at this group, the point of view of older people on this key point of life has hardly been addressed. Methods and analysis The PEPE cohort study is a prospective, observational, longitudinal study with a mixed design. This study aims to identify, from a qualitative approach, the needs and demands of early retirees and recent retirees in retirement preparation interventions and to determine their perceptions of the factors influencing successful retirement. In addition, from a qualitative approach, it aims to identify profiles of retirees on the basis of physical, mental, social, and financial domains and to determine the prevalence of the different retirement profiles. The qualitative study will be analyzed following Giorgi’s phenomenology approach and triangulated by three researchers following Guba and Lincoln’s reliability criteria. The quantitative study will involve 412 persons aged 60 years or older of both genders who are going to retire in the next 6 months or who have retired in the last 12 months in the provinces of Cuenca, Albacete, and Toledo (Spain).