Abstract
There is a vast literature on the health benefits associated with volunteering for volunteers. Such health advantages are likely to vary across groups of volunteers with different characteristics. The current paper aims to examine the health advantages of volunteering for European volunteers and explore heterogeneity in the association between volunteering and health. We carry out a mega-analysis on microdata from six panel surveys, covering 952,026 observations from 267,212 respondents in 22 European countries. We provide open access to the code we developed for data harmonization. We use ordinary least squares, fixed effects, first difference, and fixed effect quantile regressions to estimate how volunteering activities and changes therein are related to self-rated health for different groups. Our results indicate a small but consistently positive association between changes in volunteering and changes in health within individuals. This association is stronger for older adults. For respondents 60 years and older, within-person changes in volunteering are significantly related to changes in self-rated health. Additionally, the health advantage of volunteering is larger for respondents in worse health. The advantage is largest at the lowest decile and gradually declines along the health distribution. The magnitude of the association at the first decile is about twice the magnitude of the association at the ninth decile. These results suggest that volunteering may be more beneficial for the health of specific groups in society. With small health advantages from year to year, volunteering may protect older and less healthy adults from health decline in the long run.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1189-1200 |
Journal | European Journal of Ageing |
Volume | 19 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank Rosan van Niekerk, Vera Kuijpers, Danique Karamat Ali, and Dave Verkaik for their work on data preparation and preliminary analyses. We thank John Wilson, Peter Groenewegen (NIVEL), Aat Liefbroer, Kene Henkens, and participants in the PARIS research colloquium at the Department of Sociology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and at the 44th ARNOVA Conference for research ideas. Thanks to the Netherlands Ministry of Health, Sports & Wellbeing for initial funding and to the European Commission for funding ITSSOIN through the 7th Framework Programme.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s).
Funding
We thank Rosan van Niekerk, Vera Kuijpers, Danique Karamat Ali, and Dave Verkaik for their work on data preparation and preliminary analyses. We thank John Wilson, Peter Groenewegen (NIVEL), Aat Liefbroer, Kene Henkens, and participants in the PARIS research colloquium at the Department of Sociology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and at the 44th ARNOVA Conference for research ideas. Thanks to the Netherlands Ministry of Health, Sports & Wellbeing for initial funding and to the European Commission for funding ITSSOIN through the 7th Framework Programme. We thank Rosan van Niekerk, Vera Kuijpers, Danique Karamat Ali, and Dave Verkaik for their work on data preparation and preliminary analyses. We thank John Wilson, Peter Groenewegen (NIVEL), Aat Liefbroer, Kene Henkens, and participants in the PARIS research colloquium at the Department of Sociology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and at the 44th ARNOVA Conference for research ideas. Thanks to the Netherlands Ministry of Health, Sports & Wellbeing for initial funding and to the European Commission for funding ITSSOIN through the 7th Framework Programme.
Funders | Funder number |
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John Wilson, Peter Groenewegen | |
Netherlands Ministry of Health, Sports & Wellbeing | |
Rosan van Niekerk | |
Seventh Framework Programme | |
European Commission | |
Nederlands Instituut voor Onderzoek van de Gezondheidszorg |
Keywords
- Europe
- Healthy ageing
- Mega-analysis
- Older adults
- Self-rated health
- Volunteering