In this paper, we aim to analyse selected structural determinants of workforce participation after retirement in Poland. By structural determinants we mean characteristics of one’s socio-economic position that (a) result from the interplay of social conditions (mechanisms of power, differentiated access to resources) and individual agency, and (b) restrict or facilitate individuals’ choices. We conceptualise workforce participation as engaging in either part- or full-time paid employment despite receiving the old-age pension. Our general hypothesis is that working in older age is not only a matter of motivation or psychological traits but also a complex interplay of structural characteristics, accumulated by individuals during their life course. In the paper, we test a number of hypotheses about the role of specific components of socio-economic status (SES), i.e. occupational prestige, education, and wealth, for workforce participation among retirees. We argue that, in case of retirees, the prestige of the last job before retirement is a more reliable measure of the social position than education. Hence, we conduct a more detailed analysis of the role of occupational prestige for the chances of being employed after retirement. The analysis was based on data gathered in the years 2013–2014 within the sixth wave of the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN (www.polpan.org). We extracted a subsample of retirees from this dataset and used logistic regression to test the hypotheses described above. We found that both occupational prestige of the last job before retirement and educational attainments are strong predictors of being in paid work after retirement, however the impact of occupational prestige varies across the groups with the lowest and higher level of retirement pension. We also found that there are horizontal differences in the occupational structure of the chances for workforce participation after retirement and additionally found that being a farm owner increases the propensity to engage in economic activity after retirement. The paper contributes to the field of studies on the relationship between SES and workforce participation after retirement in line with the cumulative advantage/disadvantage theory and shows that resources that individuals have accumulated during the life course can determine their chances of working after retirement just as individual motivations or organisational characteristics do.

The Polish Panel Survey POLPAN provides data infrastructure to analyze the dynamics of social inequality from a life-course perspective. Historical events shape the study’s research design. In 1987–1988, 5,817 randomly sampled men and women aged 21–65 are interviewed in what is still state socialist Poland. Soon after, their lives are upended by the profound transformations that the anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe triggered. To understand how people transition to the emerging social structure, close to half of the respondents are re-interviewed in 1993. This sample serves as a panel that we follow every 5 years, most recently in 2018. Since 1998, POLPAN waves feature renewal samples of the youngest cohort that become part of the panel. Participants are interviewed face-to-face on a wide range of topics, including educational and occupational careers, psychological functioning, physical and mental health, political behaviours, and social attitudes. These topics address POLPAN’s overarching research problem, how does social position influence individual biographies and social networks, and how do individual choices that peoples’ biographies and networks reflect, in turn influence their later social standing. A multi-dimensional approach to data quality informs POLPAN methodology and the decision to publicly share the project’s products, including datasets and analytic tools.

General population surveys target the entire adult populations of participating countries, where, in many advanced societies, older respondents constitute an ever increasing share. Reflecting these processes, in the European Social Survey (ESS), the proportion of older respondents has been increasing. 2 Prior research has found that older respondents are more often assessed by interviewers as having problems with understanding survey questions. This has been attributed to older respondents' lower cognitive performance resulting in lower quality responses. While researchers recognize the social character of the face-to-face interview situation, till now, analyses of the links between age and data quality have focused on characteristics of the respondent while largely ignoring the characteristics and active role of the interviewer. One possible reason for this is that data on interviewers' characteristics in many publicly available datasets are either lacking or very limited. Ignoring the role of the interviewer may also be related to the wider tendency to treat survey (quantitative, in general) data as "objective", despite methodological evidence to the contrary.