Focus group findings: successful ageing of Australian baby boom career women

Worldwide attention is focused on the massive baby boom cohort as they move into their retirement years. The purpose of the focus group stage of this research project was to use the voices of Australian baby boom career women (women born from 1946 to 1964) to inform the development of a conceptual measure and model of psychosocial wellbeing for this cohort. This project addresses Australia's National Research Priority: Ageing well, ageing productively, by meeting the urgent need to assess the perceptions of baby boom women prior to retirement transitions. This paper reports on the findings from six focus groups: three conducted in Far North Queensland (n = 16) and three conducted in Melbourne (n = 14). The results of thematic content analysis confirmed five major themes: generativity; continuity of self-accomplishment; spirituality; autonomy and unknown caregiver roles. Results of content analysis of the Melbourne group added a sixth emerging dimension; concerns for personal safety. Additionally, differences between baby boom career women to previous cohorts emerged, which may originate in shifting identities and changing gender roles. Furthermore, dissimilarities appeared between early baby boomers (women born from 1946 to 1955) compared with late baby boomers (women born from 1956 to 1964), suggesting that baby boomers comprise more than one cohort. Significant findings presented in this paper are that late baby boom career women were significantly more satisfied in their career/vocation than were early baby boom career women. These areas provide fertile ground for development of better social strategies to improve the capacities, productivity, independence and sense of purpose in life of baby boom career women in retirement, if indeed they do retire