Formal Volunteering and Its Impact on Paid-Work after Formal Retirement

Background and Purpose. Theoretically, engagement in productive activities, including paid work, volunteering, is likely to increase older adults’ health, social, and economic status. Society may also benefit from individuals prolonging their working lives as they bolster their own retirement assets and contribute to social insurance programs. Yet most of the productive aging scholarship has focused the impact of formal volunteering on health and social outcomes; few have examined how formal volunteering relates to economic opportunities in later life. Informed by role theory, this study investigates how formal volunteering facilitates or attenuates the ability to reengage in paid-work after formal retirement.

 Methods. Data were drawn from the Health and Retirement Study of fully retired older adults aged 62+ in 1998 (n=8,334) and followed to 2008. Formal volunteering was measured with the question, “Have you spent any time in the past 12 months doing volunteer work for religious, educational, health-related or other charitable organizations?” To capture intensity, the question was asked “Altogether, how many hours did you spend in the past 12 months doing volunteer work for such organizations?” and was recoded into three categories: none (zero hours), some (greater than 0 hours, less than 100 hours) and a lot (100 hours or more). The group “none” was used as the reference group. Formal volunteering was treated as time-variant. Controls included age, sex, race, total household assets, total household income, pension presence, Medicare, employer sponsored retiree health insurance, formal education, self-rated health, life-time occupational status, marital status, employment status of spouse, and parenting. Fully conditional specification imputation method was used to complete all missing values. Survival analyses were used to test hypotheses.

 Results. Results suggests formal volunteering was positively related to returning to paid-work after formal retirement (p<.0001, HR:1.58, CL:1.28-1.94); which suggests people who formally volunteered were 58% more likely to return to work in subsequent waves when compared to people who did not volunteer. When examining intensity of volunteering, results suggest that retirees who engage in some, or a lot of formal volunteering were 50% (p<.0011, HR:1.50, CL:1.17-1.92) and 66% (p<.0001, HR:1.66, CL:1.29-2.14) more likely to return to work in subsequent waves when compared to people who did not volunteer.

 Discussion. Formal volunteering in later life had a salutatory impact on the probability of returning to work after retirement. Policymakers who encourage longer working lives should also consider bolstering volunteer programs nationally in order to capitalize on the economic benefits of volunteering. Organizations seeking to increase their volunteer labor force by recruiting more older adults can use this knowledge to promote volunteer involvement as a pathway to work.