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Centre for Policy on Ageing | |
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Volunteering and mortality among older adults
— findings from a national sample | | Author(s) | Marc A Musick, A Regula Herzog, James S House |
| Journal title | The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, vol 54B, no 3, May 1999 |
| Pages | pp S173-180 |
| Keywords | Voluntary work [elderly] ; Death rate [statistics] ; Correlation ; United States of America. |
| Annotation | Although a number of authors have proposed that older volunteers should benefit in terms of better health and well-being, few researchers have examined this issue empirically. This article considers the association between volunteering and mortality among older adults. Using data from a nationally representative US sample, Cox proportional hazards regression is used to estimate the effects of volunteering on the rate of mortality among people aged 65 and older. Volunteering is found to have a protective effect on mortality among those who volunteered for one organisation or for forty hours or less over the past year. It is also found that that the protective effects of volunteering are strongest for respondents who report low levels of informal social interaction and who do not live alone. The authors discuss the possibility of a curvilinear relationship between volunteering and mortality as being due to a combination of factors, including self-identity, role strain and meaningfulness. Other research using more precise data is needed to determine whether these ideas are supportable. (RH). |
| Accession Number | CPA-990826234 A |
| Classmark | GHH: S5: 49: 7T |
Data © Centre for Policy on Ageing |
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| ...from the Ageinfo database published by Centre for Policy on Ageing. |
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