QUALITY DECLARATION – SUMMARY
INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENT
For information on the institutional environment of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), including the legislative obligations of the ABS, financing and governance arrangements, and mechanisms for scrutiny of ABS operations, please see ABS Institutional Environment.
RELEVANCE
The Retirement and Retirement Intentions survey provides data about the retirement status and retirement intentions of people aged 45 years and over who have, at some time, worked for two weeks or more. The data collected in the Retirement and Retirement Intentions topic provide information on retirement trends, the factors which influence decisions to retire, and the income arrangements that retirees and potential retirees have made to provide for their retirement. The data are cross-classified by a range of demographic characteristics such as age, sex and country of birth, as well as labour force characteristics.
Full details of the data items are available on the ABS website in an Excel spreadsheet, under the Downloads section (B&I and R&RI 2012–13 Data Items List).
TIMELINESS
The Retirement and Retirement Intentions survey is collected biennially, and was first conducted in 2004–05. The most recent Retirement and Retirement Intentions survey was conducted throughout Australia during the 2012-13 financial year. It was a component of the 2012-13 Multipurpose Household Survey (MPHS), collected as a supplement to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Labour Force Survey (LFS). Results from the survey are released approximately six months after the completion of enumeration in the publication Retirement and Retirement Intentions (cat. no. 6238.0).
ACCURACY
The number of completed interviews (after taking into account scope and coverage exclusions) for the Retirement and Retirement Intentions survey was 8,300. The response rate was approximately 78% after taking the exclusions into account. See the Explanatory Notes (paragraph 10) for more information.
Estimates from the survey are subject to sampling and non-sampling errors.
The MPHS was designed primarily to provide estimates at the Australia level. Broad estimates are available for states and territories, though users should exercise caution when using estimates at this level because of the presence of high sampling errors. RSEs for all estimates in the publication are available on the ABS website. As a guide, estimates and RSEs for Tables 1 and 2 are presented in the Technical note.
COHERENCE
From 2012-13, the survey now includes people living in very remote parts of Australia but excludes people living in Indigenous communities in very remote parts of Australia.
For the 2012–13 survey, questions were included on self assessed health, whether had private health insurance and housing tenure. These were last included in the 2008–09 survey.
The 2012–13 survey included the new items, satisfaction with current hours worked, satisfaction with current work arrangements, whether was self funded at retirement, whether is currently self funded in retirement and whether expects to be self funded in retirement.
The 2012–13 survey has been weighted using the latest estimates of the population, based on quarterly Estimated Resident Population, as standard. While Labour Force survey benchmarks are revised every 5 years, to take into account the outcome of the 5-yearly rebasing of the Estimated Resident Population following the latest Census, the supplementary surveys and multi-purpose household surveys (from which the statistics in this publication are taken) are not. Small differences will therefore exist between the civilian population aged 15 years and over reflected in the Labour Force survey and other labour household surveys estimates, as well as over time (eg. between the 2010-11 and 2012-13 Retirement and Retirement Intentions surveys).
INTERPRETABILITY
The Retirement and Retirement Intentions publication contains detailed Explanatory Notes, Technical Notes and a Glossary that provide information on the terminology, classifications and other technical aspects associated with these statistics.
Seasonally adjusted and trend estimates are not produced. The estimates are based on information collected over the financial year. However, seasonal weighting is not undertaken.
Further commentary is often available through articles and data published in other ABS products, including:
Australian Labour Market Statistics (cat. no. 6105.0).
Australian Social Trends (cat. no. 4102.0) - refer to the Article archive for past articles.
Labour Statistics: Concepts, Sources and Methods (cat. no. 6102.0.55.001).
Year Book, Australia (cat. no. 1301.0) - refer to the 'Labour' chapter.
ACCESSIBILITY
In addition to the PDF publication, the tables and associated RSEs will be available in spreadsheet form on the website.
Data is available on request. Note that detailed data can be subject to high relative standard errors and, in some cases, may result in data being confidentialised.
For 2010–11, a microdata data file is available to via TableBuilder. This replaced the Confidentialised Unit Record File (CURF) that was created for 2008–09 MPHS and general MPHS CURFs before then.
For further information about these or related statistics, contact the National Information and referral centre on 1300 135 070 or Labour Market Statistics Section in Canberra on (02) 6252 7206, or by email to <labour.statistics@abs.gov.au>.
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