The elders of the kibbutz

In order to test the hypothesis that retirement would be particularly stressful for this highly motivated cohort, forty retired members of Israeli kibbutzim (22 men, 18 women) were interviewed in an open-ended fashion, concerning their early history, their decision to join the kibbutz, their working life, and their post-retirement adaptation. Little evidence of significant psychopathology was found, and those instances were for the most part traceable to traumatic rearing in the family of orientation, rather than to current, post-retirement losses and insults. These findings are discussed in terms of the Habitat-Niche model developed by Gutmann.