The impact of widowhood on older adults' social participation and volunteerism

Background and Purpose: Widowhood eliminates a key source of social support, but may lead to greater involvement social activities and even greater volunteer participation, which are related to better late life health and functioning. Utz et al. (2002) found that persons that recent widows have higher levels of informal social support than non-widows, while the levels of formal social support are comparable between the two groups. Additionally, Li (2007) found that widowed individuals had a higher likelihood of pursuing formal volunteer roles than non-widowed individuals. This study is a quasi- replication of the Utz et al. and Li findings, and builds upon this and other prior work by examining differences in resiliency of social participation between the widowed and non-widowed, controlling for previous levels of social participation and other demographic characteristics. Using the Americans' Changing Lives (ACL) dataset, we elucidate the relationships 1) between formal and informal social participation, 2) formal and informal volunteering, and 3) the robustness of those relationships following spousal death.

Methods: Recently widowed individuals ages 60 and over (n=228) were compared with random, non-widowed older adult controls (n=228) across three waves of data. We used generalized estimating equations to assess the impact of widowhood on levels social participation and formal and informal volunteerism, controlling for factors such as sex, age, education, household income, home ownership, race, functional health, self-rated health, depression, extraversion, employment, no children, and previous levels of social participation

Results: Similar to Utz et al., we found that informal social participation was positively related to widowhood (b= 0.681, p<.001) and gender (b = 0.275, p<.01). Additional significant differences were identified between informal social participation and age (b = -.036, p<.001), education (b = .076, p<.001), homeownership (b = .280, p<.05), extraversion (b = .162, p<.001), and no children (b= .279, p<.05). Differently than Utz et al., formal social participation was also significantly associated with widowhood (b= .329, p>.01), as well as homeownership (b= .529, p<.001), depression (b= -.176, p<.01), and extraversion (b= .195, p<.001). Addressing our second research question, unlike Li's findings, our analyses did not reveal a significant relationship between widowhood and either formal or informal volunteerism. Finally, controlling for previous levels of social participation, widowhood remained significantly related to both informal social participation (b= .671, p<.001) and formal social participation (b= .451, p<.001). Controlling for previous levels of participation greatly increased the explanatory power of the models (r2 .58-.63).

Conclusions and Implications: Older adults turn to other sources of social support following the loss of a spouse. This event appears to trigger greater involvement in established social networks, but not changes in community involvement. Instead, formal and informal volunteer behavior are robust to spousal death. These findings are particularly relevant to the field of social work; as the population ages, those in social work will be called upon to offer supportive services. Greater efforts to connect older widows to the community may needed to expand their sources of social support. Recommendations for future research efforts are made.