volunteering
a The socio-demographic variables adjusted in the multivariate linear regression models were also controlled in the parameters equivalence constraints model
b Difference in Betas is simply (β other-oriented – βself-oriented ); β = regression beta; SE = stand error
*** p < .001
The present study investigated the cumulative effects of other- and self-oriented volunteering on various health outcomes in a population-based sample of general adults, a previously uncharted research topic. Results confirmed that volunteering, regardless of the form being examined, had significant health effects. Past pertinent research investigating the volunteering and health connection mainly focused on a subpopulation of people, e.g. elderly people, or disregarded the interrelated relationships between the health outcomes, hence compromising external validity and accuracy of the results [ 7 – 9 ]. Results of this study add evidence to the literature that volunteering engenders health benefits across various health outcomes in a cumulative way by participation in several voluntary services contemporaneously in the general adult public. Consistent with prior research, the present study supports the beneficial effects of volunteering on mental and physical health, life satisfaction, social well-being and depression. However, despite the cumulative health effects of volunteering across various health outcomes found in this study, the magnitude of these health effects did vary. Most notable are the strongest effect of other-oriented volunteering on social well-being and the strongest effect of self-oriented volunteering on physical health, which reveal the different nature of these two forms of volunteering. Other-oriented volunteering is more other-regarding, altruistic and humanitarian-concerned than is self-oriented volunteering; the latter is more self-enhancing and self-actualizing [ 10 , 11 ]. Thus, more trustworthy interpersonal relationships, a supportive network, a sense of mattering and life meaning are expected for other-oriented volunteering rather than self-oriented volunteering. In contrast, self-oriented volunteering may involve more physical, cultural and career activities that may maximize the physical health of volunteers. However, these postulates do not negate the also robust positive effect of other-oriented volunteering on physical health, and the above explanations are tentative. Hence, more research is needed.
In addition, the Wald test of the parameters equivalence constraint supports the stronger health effects of other-oriented volunteering rather than of self-oriented volunteering, indicating that serving others out of sheer altruism, genuineness and humanitarian concern is important in reaping better health. The serving process of other-oriented volunteering stresses unselfishness, sharing, other-directedness, and generosity, which are counteractive to the ego-centric and self-serving culture that is upheld nowadays and may harm mental and behavioural health [ 23 ]. In fact, some personal intrinsic motives, e.g. narcissism and self-preoccupation, may lead to health-compromising behaviour and then detriment to health [ 23 , 24 ]. Recent mental health research supports the importance of some virtues, e.g. generosity and gratitude, in relation to health [ 25 , 26 ]. Therefore, it is plausible that the health effects of other-oriented volunteering are significantly stronger than those of self-oriented volunteering found in this study (Table (Table4). 4 ). In addition, this difference in intrinsic motives between other-oriented and self-oriented volunteering helps explain why the former can alleviate depression but the latter does not, as self-preoccupation and pursuits are etiologic of depression [ 24 ].
However, when comparing the effects of other-oriented and self-oriented volunteering on depression, the Wald test did not find a significant difference between the two forms of volunteering. This corresponds to the eudaimonic theory of well-being and past research results of volunteering effects on positive and negative affect [ 8 , 27 ]. These results indicate that engaging in meaningful and prosocial behaviours, e.g. volunteering, may effectively enhance positive emotions but may be less efficacious in reducing negative affect or mental distress. This may be due to volunteering that, regardless of the form, is not a direct problem-solving strategy to tackle and resolve negative affect, that is, caused by a specific life situation such as traumatic events and experiences. Hence, the weakest significant effect of other-oriented volunteering, β = −.044, p < .05, and the weakest and insignificant effect of self-oriented volunteering on depression, β = −.021, p > .05, are evident in this study. Thus, it is comprehensible to have an insignificant difference when comparing the effects of the two forms of volunteering on depression. Nevertheless, future research should put a lens on different health effects of volunteering on the positive and negative side of health outcomes.
Recent research studies have reported that other-oriented volunteers tend to be more involved, satisfied and persistent in their volunteering work than are self-oriented volunteers [ 11 , 28 ]. Therefore, when promoting the health effects of volunteerism, health professionals, educators and policymakers should note the importance of volunteers of different orientations in influencing the sustainability and provision of services. In fact, a better matching strategy is needed for the alignment of appropriate types of voluntary services to volunteers of different orientations [ 28 , 29 ]. As the results of better health benefits by other-oriented volunteering obtained from this investigation and other pertinent studies show [ 2 , 11 , 29 ], related parties and organizations should highlight the health benefits of serving others in need with altruistic attitudes and humanitarian concerns and promote an other-regarding culture of volunteerism. Table Table1 1 shows a significant correlation between other-oriented and self-oriented volunteering, implying that some volunteers may cut across and simultaneously participate in other- and self-oriented forms of voluntary services. Hence, future research should explore if this mixed form of volunteering might result in comparatively better health benefits than other forms might.
In this study, the adult participants who were older, non-White, had less education, were unmarried, and unemployed had poorer health outcomes across both the other-oriented and the self-oriented volunteering regression models. In fact, people with these background characteristics also tend to volunteer less [ 3 , 7 , 14 ], which would occasion a twofold effect on their health risks. Hence, promoting volunteering opportunities to these people can be a way of keeping them healthy.
Public health, education and policy practitioners are advised to encourage volunteering as a kind of healthy lifestyle among the general public, especially in the form of other-oriented volunteering. They should have social service professionals promote a culture of volunteerism among underprivileged social groups, e.g. elderly people, ethnic minorities, lower-educated people, unmarried and unemployed people. Although there has been a changing trend toward episodic and self-oriented volunteering in recent years [ 11 , 27 , 28 ], highlighting the better health effects of other-oriented volunteering and promoting the basic altruistic and other-regarding nature of volunteerism should be noted for the related practitioners. However, the present study has certain limitations. First, cross-sectional data make causality of the relationships impossible. Second, self-reported health outcomes are less favourable than are the objectively diagnosed health outcomes. Third, broad classification of participation in various types of voluntary services into other- and self-oriented volunteering based on secondary data is less adequate than are first-hand data, which can more effectively help clarify the nature of voluntary services for classification purposes. Hence, it is necessary to be aware of the limitations of the classification approach based on the secondary data used in this study. Lastly, neither the present investigation nor most prior studies have explored possible mediators that link the relationship between volunteering and health, which is important for comprehension of the mechanisms that volunteering engenders on health benefits. Therefore, future studies should address these limitations and provide a more comprehensive picture of the health benefits of volunteering.
Genuine thanks to Dr. Marc A. Musick, who initiated and headed the Survey of Texas Adults 2004, and distributed the data of the survey for public use through the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR).
The study was supported by CityU Strategic Research Grants (Project No. 9048093) and General Research Fund (Early Career Scheme) (Project No. 7004508).
Abbreviations.
EM | Expectation Maximization |
GED | General Educational Development |
US citizen | citizen of the United States |
JY drafted the manuscript of this study, including obtaining data from ICPSR, analysing the data, and writing the manuscript. ZZ and TYK participated in reviewing and revising the second draft of the study. ZZ also provided advice on the statistical procedures used in this study. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Ethical review was not needed, as CityU does not require an ethical review of existing data, documents, or records for public use.
Not applicable.
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
1 Three of the five health outcome variables were measured by a single question item with a 4-point or a 5-point scale, and some researchers believe this type of outcome should be treated as ordered categorical variables. Therefore, we re-ran the data with Probit regression models. Results showed that the standardized coefficients of Probit regression models were similar to the findings obtained from multivariate linear regression models. In fact, statisticians have argued that when a dependent variable is measured by 4-point or 5-point rank-ordered categories, there would be little difference between the results obtained from ordinal regression and OLS regression [ 20 , 21 ]. When an outcome is measured by an ordered categorical scale, e.g. “Overall, how would you rate your mental health at the present time? Would you say it is excellent, very good, good, fair, or poor?” on a 5-point scale (1 = excellent, 2 = very good, 3 = good, 4 = fair, and 5 = poor), a latent continuous variable, y * , ranging from -∞ to ∞ is denoted. For measurement purposes this is, mapped to an observed variable y. Hence, the above ordinal outcome as an example is in principle related to a continuous, latent variable y * in indicating a person’s level of mental health by category, ranging from “excellent” to “poor”. Therefore, the observed y is related to y * in an equation of “ y i = m if τ m-1 ≤ y i * <τ m for m = 1 to Ј ”. For easier interpretation, the present study opted for the results of multivariate linear regression models. Readers can contact the first author to obtain the results from Probit regression models for reference.
37 Pages Posted: 17 Feb 2021 Last revised: 7 Jul 2022
University of Colorado at Boulder - Leeds School of Business
Indiana University - Kelley School of Business - Department of Operation & Decision Technologies
Date Written: July 6, 2022
Online volunteering platforms allow humanitarian organizations (HOs) to recruit volunteers to work remotely on projects of varying urgency. While removing time and space constraints enables HOs to scale up their volunteer force, HOs must manage greater heterogeneity in volunteers’ experience. We investigate empirically how volunteers’ experience impacts two performance metrics on online volunteering platforms: project completion rate and volunteer retention. In addition, we examine the conditions under which experience becomes more relevant to project completion rate and retention. We collected a novel panel dataset from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team Tasking Manager. Our dataset includes 5,162 online volunteering projects with 2,169,683 contributions by 96,450 volunteers. Results from a panel regression model show that a project’s completion rate improves in diminishing increments with the experience of the contributing volunteers. We further find that the effect of experience on project completion rate is contingent on the urgency of the project. Regarding retention, results from a parametric hazard model indicate that volunteers are incentivized to return to an online volunteering platform more quickly when they are closer to attaining a new experience-based rank. However, we find that this effect weakens as volunteers gain experience. Overall, our study sheds light on volunteer management in an online context and offers operational insights on the recruitment and allocation of volunteers for HOs as well as online volunteering platforms.
Keywords: volunteer management, online volunteering platforms, volunteer experience, project completion, retention
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9 February 2016. ENCOURAGING VOLUNTEERISM 2. Abstract. Volunteerism and community involvement have been demonstrated to offer bene fits. both to communities and to volunteers themselves. However ...
By focusing on volunteers, current research prioritizes the supply perspective over organizational demand and capacity for volunteers (Handy & Brudney, 2007).A significant resource for many nonprofit organizations (Jäger et al., 2009), volunteering often occurs at the interface of community and volunteer-management systems.Therefore, it is important to examine the organizational variables ...
This paper is divided into three parts. The first explores attempts to capture and describe how volunteering has changed over the years. This section examines the dominant conceptualizations of volunteering as a social practice and explores how research has taken into account the contribution of volunteering to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda.
Volunteering provides unique benefits to organisations, recipients, and potentially the volunteers themselves. This umbrella review examined the benefits of volunteering and their potential moderators. Eleven databases were searched for systematic reviews on the social, mental, physical, or general health benefits of volunteering, published up to July 2022. AMSTAR 2 was used to assess quality ...
There was no evidence of moderation of gender. More research is needed to explore the optimal intensity of volunteering, the role of SES, whether formal or informal volunteering is most beneficial, and whether the moderation of age is related to retirement, as current evidence is inconsistent. ... Ironson G, Hill PC. Volunteer work, religious ...
Volunteers need to be effectively managed to maximize the benefits to themselves and to the organizations they serve. Volunteer management research offers insights to managers seeking to lead more effective volunteer programs and has continued to evolve according to the needs of the organizations.
5.3. Well-being of science-based research volunteers. Previous research established that frequent face-to-face volunteering is associated with well-being (Creaven et al., Citation 2018; Musick & Wilson, Citation 2003). Our findings suggest this to be true in this instance as well, showing that online science-based research volunteering also ...
Data focusing on the views/experiences of voluntary organisations or staff rather than volunteers themselves; Papers on patient/public involvement in research design/delivery; Papers containing no data related to personal well-being; Unpaid intern appointments; Informal volunteering (e.g. giving advice to a family member, transport to a ...
Gillath et al.'s (2005) research found that engaging in volunteer activities reduced the ill . effects of attachment style on loneliness and self-reported interpersonal difficulties.
Volunteering research focuses predominantly on predicting participation in volunteering, proceeding from the quasi-hegemonic foundation of resource theory and dominant-status theory. Empirical research in this tradition has provided extremely robust evidence that dominant groups in society are more likely to volunteer. At the same time, it has reinforced the status quo in the production of ...
The topic of volunteer recruitment, activation, commitment, and retention is an area of growing concern in the nonprofit sector. There is a consistent view in research literature (Cuskelly, Hoye, & Auld, Citation 2006; Rochester, Paine, Howlett) that volunteering in developed communities is under pressure from a number of factors that intersect and impact on volunteers at different levels.
Research by Hu et al. (2016) revealed the importance of co-worker support by showing that it substitutes for prosocial motivation; in other words, employees do not need to be pro-socially motivated to engage in volunteering if their coworkers already volunteer. However, not all research suggests that co-workers positively influence each other ...
Abstract. I use a volunteer process model to organize a review of recent research on volunteerism, focusing mainly on journal articles reporting survey research results. Scholars from several different disciplines and countries have contributed to a body of work that is becoming more theoretically sophisticated and methodologically rigorous.
The literature reveals the positive relationships between volunteers' motivation, satisfaction, and longevity of volunteer engagement in stewardship actions (Bruyere & Rappe, 2007;Jacobson et al ...
Evidence of the correlation between volunteering and wellbeing has been gradually accumulating, but to date this research has had limited success in accounting for the factors that are likely to drive self-selection into volunteering by 'happier' people. To better isolate the impact that volunteering has on people's wellbeing, we explore nationally representative UK household datasets ...
Volunteer Recruitment, Activation, Commitment, and Retention: An Introduction to the Special Issue. The topic of volunteer recruitment, activation, commitment, and retention is an area of growing concern in the nonprofit sector. There is a consistent view in research literature (Cuskelly, Hoye, & Auld, 2006; Rochester, Paine, Howlett) that ...
Yet, research findings suggested that the development of a strategic plan for the socialization of newcomers and for formal and informal training of volunteers could help managers and tutors to most fruitfully manage this special kind of human resources, who although making a voluntary experience might represent a precious, even if transitory ...
While much research has focused on what motivates people to volunteer, very little has focused on the process of volunteer motivation. In this paper, we move beyond the traditional content-based approaches to explain how people decide whether to volunteer, how much effort to expend, and then whether to continue volunteering over time.
Prior research indicates that volunteers of other-oriented motivation were more likely to volunteer in health, social, religious and other philanthropic services . Hence, other-oriented volunteering was measured by summing up participation in the past 12 months in the voluntary services of health, education, religious groups, human services ...
These earlier reviews predominantly focus on theories and (survey) research that seek to explain why people are volunteering by examining individual-level and country-level variables—thus, aiming at delineating a "social profile" of the volunteers. In his latest review essay (2012), Wilson starts from a volunteer process model ...
those that only utilized direct service volunteers. Finally, this research provided evidence that net benefits accrued at a higher rate for nonprofits that utilize both direct and indirect service volunteers compared to those involving only direct service volunteers. Keywords: nonprofit management, volunteer management, program evaluation, net ...
the faceted theory of systemic functioning (Shye 1985a,1989), to be outlined further. below, as a basis for observing, assessing and structuring motivations to volunteer. 2.2 The Social ...
While removing time and space constraints enables HOs to scale up their volunteer force, HOs must manage greater heterogeneity in volunteers' experience. We investigate empirically how volunteers' experience impacts two performance metrics on online volunteering platforms: project completion rate and volunteer retention.
WASHINGTON, Aug. 26, 2024 — In June 2024, a landmark Alzheimer's research paper was retracted due to fraud allegations. Did we waste billions of dollars and thousands of hours of scientists' time? Maybe not. There are now two potentially helpful drugs on the market targeting the subject of the paper: amyloid beta.