Voluntary Work Design, Volunteer Engagement and Healthy Aging in Later Life: A Mixed Method Study

Volunteering in later life is a key initiative to achieve healthy aging at individual and societallevels. Many studies have focused on the quantity of volunteering (e.g., volunteering hours) tooptimize volunteering benefits, while the quality of volunteering (e.g., volunteer engagement)has been largely ignored. Few studies have simultaneously investigated the impact of quantityand quality of volunteering on health and well-being in later life. Furthermore, no studies haveinvestigated the underlying theoretical linkages between voluntary work characteristics,volunteering hours/volunteer engagement, and health/well-being among older adult volunteers.This proposed study aims to advance scholarship by innovatively integrating role engagementtheory and work design theory into the gerontological literature of productive aging to betterunderstand optimizing volunteering benefits in later life. This study investigates: (1) theassociation between volunteering hours and volunteer engagement and health and well-being;(2) whether volunteer engagement moderates the relationship between volunteering hours andhealth and well-being; (3) how voluntary work characteristics, including skill variety, tasksignificance, task identity, autonomy, feedback from the voluntary work, social support withinthe volunteering, and recognition influence volunteering hours and volunteer engagement; (4)whether voluntary work characteristics indirectly influence the health and well-being of olderadult volunteers through increasing their volunteering hours and facilitate volunteerengagement; and (5) the best practices and challenges of designing and implementingmeaningful voluntary work to engage older adults as volunteers. This study will adopt a sequential explanatory mixed-method design. Study 1 will recruita sample of 450 volunteers aged 60 and over from elderly community centres in Hong Kongto address Project Objectives 1-4. Study 2 will comprise (1) focus groups with older adultvolunteers to help explain and contextualize the quantitative results by exploring an in-depthunderstanding of their volunteering experience and (2) focus groups with social workers andvolunteer program managers from elderly community centres to understand best practices andchallenges of designing and implementing voluntary work environments to engage older adultsas volunteers, addressing Project Objectives 5. This study will break new ground in the existing literature of productive aging bypresenting a deeper theoretical understanding of older adults’ volunteerism and the impact ofvoluntary work characteristics on volunteering hours, volunteer engagement and then healthyaging outcomes in later life. This knowledge will enable non-profit organizations aiming toinvolve older adults as volunteers to systematically restructure their existing volunteerprograms and develop new volunteer programs as innovative strategies to promote healthyaging, and inform policymakers of directions to build a supportive voluntary work environmentto enable older adults to fulfill their potential to contribute to society, as part of the global actionoutlined in the Decade of Healthy Aging.