BACKGROUND Volunteering has been advocated by the United Nations, and American and European governments as a way to engage people in their local communities and improve social capital, with the potential for public health benefits such as improving wellbeing and decreasing health inequalities. Furthermore, the US Corporation for National and Community Service Strategic Plan for 2011-2015 focuse...

OBJECTIVES The association of volunteering with well-being has been found in previous research, but mostly among older people. The aim of this study was to examine the association of volunteering with mental well-being among the British population across the life course. DESIGN British Household Panel Survey, a population-based longitudinal study. SETTING UK. PARTICIPANTS 66 343 observati...

The robust association between religion and volunteering and education and volunteering can be interpreted in developmental terms as a function of socialization. Churches and schools instill attitudes that predispose the individual to volunteer. Data from two waves of the National Survey of Midlife in the United States (1995 and 2005) are used to test a hypothesis that generativity—a desire to ...

BACKGROUND The motivation to volunteer on a medical service trip (MST) may involve more than a simple desire for philanthropy. Some volunteers may be motivated by an intrinsic interest in volunteering in which the context of the volunteer activity is less important. Others may volunteer because the context of their volunteering is more important than their intrinsic interest in volunteering. Fu...

OBJECTIVES This study investigated race differences in the relationship between formal volunteering and hypertension prevalence among middle-aged and older adults. METHOD Using data from the 2004 and 2006 Health and Retirement Study (N = 5,666; 677 African Americans and 4,989 whites), we examined regression models stratified by race to estimate relationships among hypertension prevalence, sys...

OBJECTIVES Existing literature has shown that volunteering is related to better physical and mental health outcomes. The purpose of this study is to examine whether personality traits and volunteering are independent predictors of physical and mental health. METHODS The current study utilizes data from the St. Louis Personality and Aging Network (SPAN), a representative sample of community-ba...

Efforts to expand protected area networks are limited by the costs of managing protected sites. Volunteers who donate labor to help manage protected areas can help defray these costs. However, volunteers may be willing to donate more labor to some protected areas than others. Understanding variation in volunteering effort would enable conservation organizations to account for volunteer labor in...

OBJECTIVES This study sought to understand the relationship between volunteer activity and happiness among a sample of older adult New Zealanders. It specifically sought to determine if ethnicity (Māori vs. non-Māori) and economic living standards (ELS) functioned as moderators of the relationship between volunteering and happiness. METHOD Data were garnered from the 2008 administration of th...

This Grounded Theory study describes the process by which older persons "become" volunteers. Forty interviews of older persons who volunteered for Habitat for Humanity were subjected to secondary content analysis to uncover the process of "becoming" a volunteer. "Helping out" (core category) for older volunteers occurs within the context of "continuity", "commitment" and "connection" which prov...

Background: The present study examined the effect of Group Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (GCBT) on inefficient beliefs and marital satisfaction in pregnant women with the Fear of First Childbirth (FoFC).  Methods: This was a quasi-experimental study with a Pre-test-Post-test and a control group design. The study participants were pregnant women with FoFC who visited Quchan health center in 2018...