Abstract
AbstractThe article investigates the conditions of multiple engagement in the private and public realm in the second half of life. More specifically, I look at the relationship between informal care-giving and formal volunteering in a country-comparative way. Based on longitudinal data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement, 2004–2015, I investigate the 50+ population in 13 European countries. Controlling for unobserved heterogeneity by using conditional fixed-effect logistic regression models, I confirm earlier findings that care-givers are more likely to volunteer than non-care-givers; this effect is independent of care-giving intensity but only true for those who care outside their own household. As to macro-level influences, I find that both care-in-kind and cash-for-care expenditures increase the likelihood of volunteering among the 50+ population. The effect of cash-for-care expenditure is even stronger for the group of those who give intensive care outside their own households than for non-care-givers. Moreover, I find effects related to family's and women's role in society. First, I show a negative effect of a country's societal norm of family orientation on volunteering participation for those giving sporadic care outside their household but also among non-care-givers. Second, in countries with higher female labour market participation among the middle-aged, the volunteering likelihood is higher for sporadic female care-givers outside their own household but also among female non-care-givers.
Highlights
While participation in various forms of unpaid activities has long been identified as important for the welfare of society, getting a better understanding of how these activities influence each other remains important
This article focuses on two types of unpaid activities in the second half of life, namely formal volunteering in clubs and associations, on the one side, and informal help and care-giving, on the other side
I separately introduced the following four variables in my models: (a) an indicator for the share of adults aged 50 or older in a country who report living in the same household or building with at least one of their parents – this indicator was aggregated over the five waves from my analytic data-set; (b) the share of women aged between 50 and 64 in a country participating in the labour market; (c) public expenditure on old-age cash benefits as a percentage of a country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP); and (d) public spending on old-age in-kind as a percentage of a country’s GDP
Summary
While participation in various forms of unpaid activities (such as informal caregiving, formal volunteering in clubs or associations, informal volunteering beyond such organisations and domestic work) has long been identified as important for the welfare of society, getting a better understanding of how these activities influence each other remains important. I expect that a high average family orientation (measured as the share of adult children living together with at least one parent) in a country should lead to informal care-givers being involved in volunteering activities.
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