Volunteering and life satisfaction: a closer look at the hypothesis that volunteering more strongly benefits the unhappy

Abstract

Volunteering positively impacts on life satisfaction and mental well-being over the deciles of the distribution for a sample of the British populace from 1996 to 2008 (BHPS data set); however, this effect is decreasing for those in the upper parts of the well-being distribution. This can be seen as support for the contention that volunteering can play a protective role for individuals and increase their well-being in the face of otherwise unsatisfactory life conditions. Looking at the effect on satisfaction with life domains, there is evidence for a positive impact of volunteering on satisfaction with health, one’s social life and amount and use of leisure time.

Keywords:

• subjective well-being
• volunteering
• BHPS
• quantile regressions
• life satisfaction

JEL Classification:

• D6
• D64
• Z1

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for having been granted access to the BHPS data set, which was made available through the ESRC Data Archive. The data were originally collected by the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change at the University of Essex (now incorporated within the Institute for Social and Economic Research). Neither the original collectors of the data nor the archive bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here. Remaining errors are mine alone.

Notes

¹ Results omitted here for space reasons but available on request.

² Analyses with the five volunteering categories lead to largely similar results and are available on request.

³ A number of robustness analyses include adding a variable for hours worked and trust of respondents, which have been proven relevant in the present context but would decrease panel size for the main analyses considerably (to 40 053 observations for the working subgroup and to 20 474 observations when including a trust dummy). Regular volunteering remains positively and significantly related (0.0451*) to subjective well-being when adding the hours worked variable, whereas a trust dummy (itself positively related to SWB: 0.0728*) leads to a loss of significance of the volunteering dummy (0.0350, n.s.). The large reduction in sample size and the loss of significance of other variables, however, suggest caution in over-interpreting this result.

⁴ Interestingly, a gender disaggregation (results not shown here) suggests that the positive effect of at least monthly volunteering is more pronounced for males (significantly positive over all deciles, from 0.136*** to 0.0697**), whereas the happier parts of the life satisfaction distribution for females show no significant impact of volunteering on life satisfaction.