How is financial retirement provision discussed? That is the fundamental question of our research project. More specifically, the topic is the discourse in the public media about financing people after their working lives. Under the question “How has retirement provision been discussed in the last ten years and what significance does capital coverage have in this discourse?” we will search through weekly and daily newspapers and analyze their discussions using a mixed methods approach.
The background to our question is the shift in retirement provision over the last 30 years from statutory, pay-as-you-go schemes to private, funded schemes. In the 1980s, the statutory pension insurance scheme (GRV) still guaranteed 70 percent of net earnings, but since then the level of protection has fallen to 43 percent. This, among other factors, increases the risk of poverty in later life. The corresponding trend toward “strengthening funded elements in the second and third pillars of old-age provision and abandoning the goal of securing living standards as the objective of statutory pension insurance” is referred to in academic discourse as a paradigm shift. The assumption that the GRV would no longer guarantee living standards was manifested politically at the beginning of the millennium in the Riester pension, the Retirement Assets Act (AVmG) and the Retirement Assets Supplement Act (AVmEG). However, not only can the GRV no longer finance pensions to the same extent as before, but according to the political narrative, its financing will no longer be possible on a purely pay-as-you-go basis in the future; capital funding is one proposed solution. This assumption has become particularly apparent with the introduction of generational capital as a response to the inadequacy of the pay-as-you-go GRV. Because of this development, independent action by private individuals in retirement provision is becoming increasingly relevant. Since such action requires knowledge, which is disseminated through the media, we will examine the public discourse on the topic of retirement provision. We will pay particular attention to the significance of capital coverage.
Accordingly, we will use discourse analysis. The analysis will be based on German weekly and daily newspapers, as these reflect public discourse (e.g., taz, Welt Online, Die Zeit, Der Tagesspiegel, Der Spiegel, Die Bild). However, we cannot examine all articles dealing with pensions or retirement provision in the form of close reading, which is why we will use the blended reading method. This complements classical discourse analysis and hermeneutics with text mining techniques. In order to be able to process even larger amounts of data, we are cooperating with the House of Computing and Data Science (HCDS) and using the D-WISE Tool Suite developed by them. This makes it possible to apply manually coded categories to large amounts of data using machine learning without having to read the texts themselves, as is the case with classic close reading. The material obtained is first analyzed using a pattern analysis, which takes temporality into account in the data analysis. We will then conduct a sociological discourse analysis according to Reiner Keller (2011). In this way, we combine classical quantitative approaches such as text mining with the otherwise mostly qualitative research approach of discourse analysis in our analysis.
References
Keller, R. (2011). Wissenssoziologische Diskursanalyse – Grundlegung eines Forschungsprogramms. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-531-92058-0.