Caregiving, volunteering, and loneliness in middle-aged and older adults: a systematic review

Abstract

Objectives

Older adults contribute vast amounts of care to society, yet it remains unclear how unpaid productive activities relate to loneliness. The objective of this systematic review is to synthesise the evidence for associations between midlife and older people’s unpaid productive activities (i.e., spousal and grandparental caregiving, volunteering) and loneliness.

Methods

Peer-reviewed observational articles that investigated the association between loneliness and caregiving or volunteering in later life (>50 years) were searched on electronic databases (Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, PsychInfo and Global Health) from inception until July 2021. Studies were analysed using narrative synthesis and assessed for methodological quality applying the Newcastle Ottawa Scale.

Results

A total of 28 articles from 21 countries with 191,652 participants were included (52.5% women). Results were separately discussed for the type of unpaid productive activity, namely, general caregiving (N = 10), spousal caregiving (N = 7), grandparental caregiving (N = 7), and volunteering (N = 6). Risk of bias assessments revealed a moderate to high quality of included studies. Loneliness was positively associated with spousal caregiving but negatively associated with caregiving to grandchildren and volunteering.

Conclusions

Grandparental caregiving and volunteering may be promising avenues for reducing loneliness in older age. Future studies will need to distinguish between different types of caregiving and volunteering and explore more complex longitudinal designs with diverse samples to investigate causal relationships with loneliness.

KEY-POINTS

• Spousal caregiving is associated with more loneliness

• Grandparental caregiving and volunteering are associated with less loneliness

• There is a lack of longitudinal evidence from lower- and middle-income countries

Keywords:

• Generativity
• social isolation
• healthy ageing
• intergenerational relationships
• grandparenting
• unpaid productive activities

Acknowledgements

We thank Leon Li (Duke University) for comments on an earlier draft of this review.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

Author contributions

SA, MP, and RM conceptualised this systematic review. SA, VH, and MW contributed to data collection; SA, VH, and MP contributed to data interpretation. All authors had access to the data reported in this review and contributed to drafting, revising, and approving the submitted manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Medical Research Council (MR/S028188/1, MR/T037423/1 and MR/T038500/1) to MP. SA is supported by a PhD fellowship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. The views expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the funders.