Secret to Happy Golden Years? Volunteer

It may not be the fountain of youth, but older adults who volunteer just two to three hours a week are living happier and healthier lives, according to a new study co-authored by a Florida State University researcher.

Jim Hinterlong, an assistant professor of social work and an affiliate at FSU's Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy, and a team of researchers found that the well-being of elders improved with the amount of time they volunteered up to 100 hours a year, or two to three hours a week.

"Our findings support the perspective that volunteering is important in the larger context of successful aging," he said. "Engagement is the key, not necessarily the hours of engagement."

The study, which Hinterlong co-authored along with Nancy Morrow-Howell and Fengyan Tang of Washington University in St. Louis and Philip Rozario of Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y., was published in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences. The researchers used data from the Americans' Changing Lives Study, which involved interviewing a representative sample of adults in the United States three times over an eight-year period.

The findings show that voluntarism is common among older adults. In the study, 34.5 percent of adults over 60 volunteered for an average of 71.5 hours per year, or less than two hours a week. Those who volunteered were most likely to affiliate with programs sponsored by religious institutions, and, on average, they contributed unpaid time to 1.7 organizations.

Compared to those who did not volunteer, the study found the volunteers had better assessments on three measures of well-being: functional status, self-rated health and depression. The positive impact reached a maximum at 100 hours per year. Higher levels of involvement were not associated with significantly higher gains.

The findings underscore the point that elders do not have to volunteer a lot of hours to reap the benefits of better mental and physical health, Hinterlong said. It also didn't matter how many organizations or the type of organizations for which the elders volunteered; the act of volunteering was the important thing.

Researchers have debated the reasons behind the connection between volunteering and improved health. Some have suggested that the connection can be traced to the social interaction that comes with volunteer work. However, Hinterlong and his colleagues suggest that this is not the only explanation.

"Volunteering has an effect beyond increasing the number of friends," the researchers concluded. "From the role enhancement perspective, the volunteer role may augment power, prestige and resources, and it might heighten the sense of identity."

More research is needed to determine exactly what it is about volunteering that improves well-being. In the meantime, social programs and policies should be developed to provide older adults with increased opportunities, incentives and supports for engaging in meaningful volunteer work, Hinterlong said.

"As a society, we tell people to plan for later life financially, but we don't encourage people to plan what they are going to do with their time, energy and experience," he said. "We need to be thinking about how we're going to invest ourselves as we grow older, and one option that has a lot of benefits is volunteer work."

The study was supported in part by a grant from the Longer Life Foundation and the Ford Foundation through the Center for Social Development at Washington University.