Pathways Linking Volunteering to Its Benefits on Older Adults' Mental Health

Background and Purpose: Cumulative empirical evidence has demonstrated that formal volunteering, which refers to volunteering activities for an organization in comparison with informal help, may have a positive association with older adults’ psychological well-being including reduced depressive symptoms. However, the systematic review of the literature showed that there is a lack of understanding of the mechanism/mediators of the relationship between volunteering and older adults’ well-being. Adopting Jahoda’s Latent Deprivation Theory, this study examined whether purpose in life and perceived social status mediate the relationship between volunteering and older adults’ mental health.

Methods: This study used two waves of the longitudinal Health and Retirement Study data (2008 & 2010), with a sample of 5,887 middle-aged and older community-dwelling adults (51+). Depressive symptoms (a scale ranging 0-8) was the outcome. Dichotomous formal volunteering (yes/no) was the independent variable. Purpose in life (a scale ranging 1-7) and perceived social status (an index ranging 1-10) were two mediators. Structural equation modeling was adopted for the analysis while controlling health status, demographics, and “Big 5” personality variables. The full-information maximum likelihood option was adopted to handle missing data. Person-level analysis weights were adopted to adjust for the non-response bias.

Results: Both indirect (β= -0.08, p<.001) and total effects (β= -0.14, p<.01) of volunteering were detected. The total indirect effect was 57% of the total effect. The direct effect was not statistically significant (β= -0.069, p=0.255). However, one should be cautious to interpret the result as having a complete mediation because Kenny and Judd (2014) demonstrated that test of the indirect effect is much more powerful than the test of the direct effect especially when the effect size is small. The indirect effect of purpose in life was 7 (.07) times of the indirect effect of perceived social status (.01).

Conclusions and implications: The findings of the mediation analyses showed that purpose in life and perceived social status together partially mediated the path from volunteering to depressive symptoms for community-dwelling older adults. The findings have implications for both theoretical development and practice. Jahoda’s theory can be adopted to explain the potential mechanism of why formal volunteering can be beneficial to older adults, which is innovative and timely because scholars have been calling for nuanced understanding of why volunteering is casting positive impact on older adults. Other mediators in Jahoda’s Latent Deprivation Theory can be further tested when the more measurement is available. In practice, gerontological social workers can also help create volunteering opportunities for older adults, particularly those who lack resources to engage in volunteering activities. Meanwhile, non-profit organizations can also help strengthen latent benefits such as purpose in life in their volunteering tasks in order to enhance older adults’ mental health.