Dynamics of volunteering in older Europeans

Abstract

Purpose: To investigate the dynamics of volunteering in the population aged 50 years or older across 11 Continental European countries.

Design and methods: Using longitudinal data from the first 2 waves of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, we run multivariate regressions on a set of binary-dependent variables indicating transitions from active volunteering to inactivity and vice versa.

Results: Volunteer transitions were affected by both time-invariant individual resources and changes in individuals' resources. Moreover, we found that the societal context in which older persons live not only has a significant impact on the prevalence of volunteering at a given point in time but that the dynamics of volunteering also vary by country.

Implications: Our study supports the notion of volunteering as an important productive aging activity and underlines the importance of both life-course and social context factors as determinants of volunteer dynamics at older ages.