INT’L. J. AGING AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT, Vol. 70(1) 89-106, 2010 CHANGE AND PERSISTENCE OF PERSONAL IDENTITIES AFTER THE TRANSITION TO RETIREMENT* URSINA TEUSCHER University of California, San Diego (UCSD) ABSTRACT This study addresses the question of how retired people’s self-image differs from that of working people, and what factors predict people’s self-definition as professionals or retirees. Seven hundred ninety-two Swiss persons aged 58-70 (386 men, 406 women; 349 not retired, 443 retired) were asked to rate the importance of different self-description domains (such as profession, family-roles, personal values, etc.). Results indicated that the profession domain remains important for self-description even after retirement, to the extent that retirement status does not predict the importance of the pro- fessional identity at all. Rather, consistent with social identity theory, the importance of the profession for self-description is best predicted by the status of the (former or current) job. The importance of the retirement status for self-definition is predicted best by a positive attitude toward aging. In general, retired respondents rated more domains of self-description as important than did not-yet-retired respondents, and no domain was less important after retirement. In other words, identity diversity was higher for the retired than for the not-yet-retired persons. In addition, high identity diversity correlated with a high satisfaction across different life domains. *This work was supported by the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Initial versions of the questionnaire were developed in collaboration with Regula Luethi, Hans-Dieter Schneider, Liselotte Voegeli, and Isolde Wattendorff. 89 Ó 2010, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc. doi: 10.2190/AG.70.1.d http://baywood.com