Social gerontologists have observed that economic determinism is problematic to the policy-making process and that there are too few inputs from other sources. The purpose of this research is to illustrate how social research can inform the current pension debate which revolves around the issues of raising the age of retirement, the merits of partial retirement and the adequacy of the new Seniors Benefit. An analysis of data on post-retirement workers is presented using the Survey of Ageing and Independence as an example of how social research can make a difference to choices about public pension policies.
