Volunteering Activities Among Older Adults: Does It Work for Depression?

Background and Purpose:

As life expectancy increases, people around the world are paying attention to “active aging.” Active aging is defined as the process of maximizing opportunities for health, participation, and security for the sake of improving the quality of life as people age. In order to be healthy in later life, one factor is related to participating in volunteer activities.

Many researchers have conducted studies regarding the effects of older adults’ volunteering and concluded that volunteer work can be beneficial to older adults by improving their psychological well-being and physical health, as well as overall quality of life. However, scholars have paid scant attention to the mechanism on how volunteering affects mental health, especially depression. In the current study, we focused on the mediation role of chronic health condition and self-efficacy, which have been considered as strong predictors of depression. The purpose of this study was to contribute to a comprehension understanding of the mechanism of volunteer activities on depression among older adults.

Methods:

The data was used from the Americans’ Changing Lives (ACL) survey, which is a nationally representative panel study collected data in 1986, 1989, 1994, and 2002. Using Mplus version 7, this study conducted the structural equation modeling (SEM) to examine the effect of volunteer activity on depression for American older adults and mediation role of chronic health condition and self-efficacy the relationship between volunteering activity and depression for American older adults. The current analysis focused on adults aged 60 and older with data from the fourth wave of the ACL (N = 703). The average age of participants was 73.08. 70.6% of sample was female and 14.2 % was employed.

Results:

The fit of the model was good (χ² /df= 1.53, p< .05, RMSEA = .04, CFI = .97, TLI = .90). The several findings emerged from the model. First, older adults who participated in volunteering activities are less likely to have depressive symptom, but the result was not statistically significant. Second, engagement in volunteering activities were associated with chronic health conditions (β=-.08, p<.05) and self-efficacy (β=.17, p<.001). Third, the chronic health conditions associated with depression (β=.15, p<.001)and self-efficacy were also associated with depression (β=-.49 p<.001). Therefore, the effects of volunteering activities on depression were fully mediated by chronic health conditions and self-efficacy.

Conclusions and Implications:

Our findings showed that the importance of systematic and continuous volunteer activities because civic engagement cannot guarantees benefits for older adults’ mental health, such as depression. This conclusion can be explained by participants’ prevalence of volunteering activities: participants involved in church (30.8%) and senior groups (15.7%). Future efforts should explore strategies, including intensity and tasks of volunteering, to optimize the effect of volunteering activities for older adults’ mental health. This study can contribute to expand our understanding of the mechanisms and effects of volunteering on older adults’ mental health.