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a University Honors College, Oregon State University, Corvallis
b Department of Sociology, University of Vermont, Burlington
Correspondence: Jon Hendricks, PhD, University Honors College, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR 97331-2221. E-mail: hendricj{at}ucs.orst.edu.
Laurence G. Branch, PhD
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Abstract |
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Key Words: Formal activities • Group memberships • Voluntarism
The frequently asserted belief that older persons do not engage in productive activities is false. In fact, through various forms of voluntary contributions, elders provide a wide range of goods and services to other segments of the population. This research is predicated on a contention that such claims risk mistaking cohort-related characteristics for willingness to contribute and actual contributions. As for older persons themselves, participation in various forms of voluntary association has salutary effects. Activity levels per se and diverse forms of engagement are thought to be supportive of life satisfaction, morale, and even physical functioning. The rewards are seemingly both intrinsic and extrinsic, leading to a preservation of sense of well-being, solidarity, integration, and health (Gecas and Burke 1995
; Moen 1996; Moen, Dempster-McClain, and Williams 1989, Moen, Dempster-McClain, and Williams 1992; Monk 1995; Musick, Herzog, and House 1999; Pillemer, Moen, Wethington, and Glasgow 2000).
Because it is widely maintained that both rates and frequency of voluntary association membership build to and then decline after a midlife peak (Fischer and Schaffer 1993; Goss 1999; Herzog and Morgan 1993; Hodgkinson and Weitzman 1996; Rotolo 2000), our focus is on life-course patterns of voluntary association. Put simply, we assert that no such fall-off occurs and that rates remain relatively stable until age 85 or so. In a recent analysis of a composite National Opinion Research Center (NORC) General Social Surveys (GSS) data set, we mustered evidence to counter the presumed decline in membership among older persons. Our data suggested that the decline is an artifact of compositional differences between cohorts. That is, any late-life declines may be attributable to factors known to differentiate among cohorts in the first place. So, for example, the population of older persons has lower levels of education, poorer health, fewer family ties, and a higher likelihood of being widowed than their younger counterparts. It is exactly these factors that are predictive of lower levels of membership in voluntary associations. The conjunction of cohort factors and rates of voluntary affiliation has led some to assume that older persons are less involved, and perhaps even in the process of disengaging from active life styles. Our findings suggest that when crucial cohort-related compositional factors are taken into account, rates of affiliation increase through the middle years and appear to remain fairly stable into the mid-80s (Cutler and Hendricks 2000). Our results are generally consistent with those of the MacArthur Studies on Successful Aging, which suggest there is continuity in later life, with more than 98% of older people who live in private households being engaged in some form of productive activities (Rowe and Kahn 1998). It may be that older persons continue their previous patterns of engagement as an adaptive strategy for as long as they are able, certainly into their mid-80s (Atchley 1999; Hays et al. 1998; Mindel and Vaughan 1978). For these and other reasons, groups or organizations charged with delivering services in the face of scarce resources perceive a vast untapped pool of older volunteers (Freedman 1997).
Those who posit a curvilinear relationship between age and rates of voluntary association with a marked downturn beyond age 65 or so, as well as those who see no such decline, both point out conflating factors not necessarily explained by compositional characteristics. One difficulty is the relative importance of two widespread forms of association: church-related affiliations and union memberships. Putnam 1995 is of the opinion that church-related associations are so pervasive in the United States that those affiliations misrepresent overall voluntary association rates. A similar claim has been made for union memberships; they are important, retained even after retirement, and pervasive enough to distort global patterns (Curtis, Grabb, and Baer 1992). Our question is simply: Do these two types of voluntary association exert an influence so ubiquitous that the entire pattern of memberships during the adult years is affected?
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Importance of Religious and Union Membership as Forms of Voluntary Association |
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ranked the United States first. Overall estimates are that 55% of all Americans are affiliated with church or religious groups, that 50–60% of all voluntary participation occurs within religious organizations, and that among older persons, about 65% identify church or synagogue as a primary focus of volunteer activity (Goss 1999; Hodgkinson and Weitzman 1996; Independent Sector 1998; Van Willigen 2000). In fact, "church-affiliated groups may be the backbone of civil society in America, involving almost half of the population" (Galston and Levine 1997, p. 25; Lipset 1990). Greeley 1997 noted that religious-based memberships have an independent effect in explaining overall levels of voluntary association in virtually all 16 countries included in the European Value Studies. Greeley reported that religious affiliation (church attendance and membership in religious groups) accounts for 38% of the variance found across the 16 countries. As he put it, "[t]he American ‘advantage’ in volunteering is patently the result of the higher levels of American religious practice" (Greeley 1997, p. 72). Whether it is because churches and religion promote a "do-gooder" mindset or a "culture of benevolence" is difficult to say; it may be that one form of participation abets other forms (Goss 1999; Musick, Wilson, and Bynum 2000; Wilson and Musick 1997).
In the United States, church affiliations are strong and appear to provide meaningful webs of social relations. In their analysis of the link between church membership and volunteering, Wilson and Janoski 1995 highlighted the complexity of the relationship and discrepancies between denominations. They noted that among Catholics, patterns form early and persist. Among liberal Protestant denominations (those associated with social activism), volunteering does not become part of the pattern or complex of values until midlife. Among conservative Protestants, generalizable patterns are least apparent, and voluntarism is largely limited to church-related activities (Wilson and Janoski 1995). Among other subgroups of the population—African American elders, for example—some research suggests that church affiliations are of such salience that they can be used effectively to provide needed services (Hatch 1991; Taylor 1986). Among older persons, some investigators suggest that religious organizations account for the preponderance of volunteer work and may provide "the most psychologically beneficial type of volunteer work" (Van Willigen 2000).
Another reason for focusing on church-related groups is that there is conceptual and empirical disagreement about the appropriate boundaries to be employed in delineating membership in this type of voluntary association. On the one hand, Smith 1983 has argued that churches (in the generic sense) are a type of voluntary organization and, therefore, a broad definition encompassing all forms of church membership should be used. On the other hand, most surveys have taken a more limited approach and have asked about membership in church-affiliated or church-related groups. Yet, there is evidence that the ambiguity in the way the question is posed leads to confusion between memberships in church-related groups and church membership per se, with the result that reported membership levels in church-affiliated groups are inflated (Smith 1990). It is also not altogether clear what modes of religious activity qualify as church-affiliated groups. Bible study and youth groups would appear to fit the description, but do church choirs or short-term preparatory classes offered prior to a church-sponsored trip to the Holy Land? In short, the need for conceptual clarification provides yet another argument for the exclusion of church-affiliated groups.
Union Membership.
Union membership has also been a conspicuous form of voluntary association, one that persists into retirement. Curtis and colleagues 1992 found that 13% of respondents in the World Values Survey reported union membership. In the GSS data set used here, 14.7% of respondents who described themselves as "retired" reported belonging to a union as well—the fourth most common form of association membership for all retirees (after church-affiliated, fraternal, and veterans groups) and third highest among male retirees (after church-affiliated and veterans groups). Continuing membership may provide social interaction and recreation, a venue for dealing with pension and benefit issues, and an opportunity to remain involved in programs and activities. According to Galston and Levine 1997, union members are more likely to participate in other voluntary associations or make charitable contributions than their nonunion counterparts. The hypothesis is that there is a "stepping stone" process—that membership in preexisting voluntary or secondary associations leads to volunteer participation (Lofland 1996, p. 187; Smith 1994; Wilson and Musick 1998).
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Methods |
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). All surveys in the GSS series (from 1972 to 1998) with the variables to be used in the analysis were selected for inclusion (see Table 1 for the survey years and initial Ns). Samplings for the 1974 survey and half of the 1975 survey were based on a block quota design; the remaining half of the 1975 survey and all other years used full probability sampling designs. Each sample was representative of the population of English-speaking persons 18 years of age and older living in noninstitutional arrangements in the United States.
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Although the final number of cases was considerably greater than is usually available for analyses of voluntary association membership, we tested for possible biases stemming from the elimination of cases by comparing the race, gender, and education distributions for the full sample and the analysis sample and found negligible differences (see Cutler and Hendricks 2000). Bias stemming from loss of cases, then, does not appear to be a significant issue.
Variables
To assess rates of membership in any of 16 possible types of formal voluntary associations, we relied on the question, "Now we would like to know something about the groups or organizations to which individuals belong. Here is a list of various organizations. Could you tell me whether or not you are a member of each type?" Respondents were then read a list that comprised fraternal groups; service clubs; veterans groups; political clubs; labor unions; sports groups; youth groups; school service groups; hobby or garden clubs; school fraternities or sororities; nationality groups; farm organizations; literary, art, discussion, or study groups; professional or academic societies; church-affiliated groups; and any other groups. Adopting the methodology used by Rotolo 1999 and others, we obtained total counts of memberships (corrected for a coding error for the years 1989–1994 [Helliwell and Putnam 1996]), with potential scores ranging from 0 to 16 (with church-affiliated groups and labor unions included) and 0 to 14 (with memberships in these two types of associations excluded). If anything, this approach underestimates total rates of affiliation as it depends on a count of types rather than actual organizational memberships (Baumgartner and Walker 1988).
We recoded age into 5-year intervals, beginning with 18–24, 25–29, and ranging up to 80–84 and 85+. Previous work (see Cutler and Hendricks 2000, for a summary) has shown that higher membership rates are found among men and Whites; among those in better health and with higher levels of education; and among persons who are employed, married, or have children residing in the household. Because distributional differences by age in these variables will have the effect of dampening membership rates of the older age groups, we controlled for gender, self-perceived health (excellent, good, fair, poor), education (0–8 years, 9–11 years, high school graduate, some college, college graduate or more), work status (full-time, part-time, unemployed, retired, other), marital status (married, widowed, divorced/separated, never married), presence of children in the household (yes, no), and race (White, non-White).
Analysis
The primary objective of this study was to determine whether the adjusted pattern of increasing voluntary association membership rates through age 50–54, and high and generally stable rates thereafter, is due to affiliations with church-related groups and labor unions. To address this question, we used Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA; SPSS for Windows, Release 7.5; Andrews, Morgan, and Sonquist 1967), a multivariate procedure that enabled us to examine the bivariate effect of age on number of memberships, as well as its impact on our dependent variables after adjusting for the effects of the controls. MCA is particularly well suited to the objectives of this analysis in that no assumption of linearity was required, and we were able to obtain both bivariate (gross) and adjusted (net) mean membership scores for each of the 14 age categories in order to examine age patterns of membership. Eta and beta coefficients can be used to evaluate strength of the relationships at the bivariate and multivariate levels, and F tests are available to determine whether any given predictor (i.e., age) explains a significant proportion of the variance in the dependent variable before and after other predictors are held constant.
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Results |
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In an effort to determine if period effects were influencing the composite pattern, our first step was to determine whether it was appropriate to aggregate the 12 surveys over the 20-year period. Based on an ordinary least squares (OLS) regression analysis examining the effects on number of memberships of survey year, age, age2, and an interaction term for age2 and survey year, we found that neither survey year nor the age2/survey year interaction was significant (see Cutler and Hendricks 2000). From these results, we concluded that the nature of the relationship between age and number of memberships did not vary during the period in question, thus justifying the aggregation of the 12 surveys in order to have as large a number of cases as possible at the oldest ages.
In looking to overall number of associations in which respondents claimed affiliation for the full set of 16 types, we found that memberships did appear to follow a curvilinear pattern by age when viewed in bivariate relationship (Table 2 ). The gross mean number of memberships was low among the youngest respondents, rose steadily to a peak at ages 40–44, and then declined through ages 85+, where the lowest average number of memberships was found. On the face of it, this might be taken to confirm the belief that there is a decline in affiliations during the retirement years. However, we then controlled for compositional effects and found a somewhat different pattern. Examination of the net mean scores for the full set of 16 types of associations showed that memberships rise from ages 25–29 and peak at ages 55–59, after which there is a long plateau, lasting until ages 85+. Because the number of respondents at even more advanced ages became so small at that point, we were unable to make any comments about what then occurs. For a more complete discussion of the results for all 16 types, see Cutler and Hendricks 2000.
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First, examination of the unadjusted (gross) mean number of memberships in the 14 types of associations showed the now familiar curvilinear pattern of age differences (Table 2 ). The highest level of affiliation occurred among persons 40–44 years of age. Membership levels trailed off steadily on both sides of this age group, with the lowest average number of memberships found among the 85+ age group.
Again, however, it must be recalled that characteristics of older persons are differentially distributed along the control variables. As detailed in Cutler and Hendricks 2000, older persons were significantly more likely to report their health as poor, have lower levels of education, and be out of the labor force. The older age groups also have higher percentages of women, widows, persons living in households without children, and at ages 85+ non-Whites. These very same characteristics dampen levels of association affiliation. The net means for the 14 types of associations yielded the pattern of age differences after the effects of the varying compositional characteristics were controlled. This pattern proved to be quite similar to what we previously found for the 16 types. Although there was an initial decline between the ages of 18–24 and 25–29, number of affiliations rose thereafter through ages 55–59, dropped slightly at ages 60–64, and then remained relatively stable through ages 85+. Even with the deletion of membership in church-related groups and labor unions, the net mean scores clearly indicate that a major source of the lower levels of association membership observed in the bivariate data among the older age groups stemmed from their compositional characteristics.
To provide a rough approximation of the significance of the changes from the unadjusted to the adjusted mean scores for each age group, 95% confidence intervals (CI) were obtained for each of the gross mean scores. The 95% CIs were used under the assumption that whether an age group's net mean falls within or outside the interval for its gross mean can be taken as an approximate indication of the significance of the change when compositional differences are controlled. The results (not presented here) provided further support for our conclusions. Specifically, for the analysis of both the 16 types and the 14 types of associations, the adjusted means fell within the 95% CIs for three of the age groups: 18–24, 45–49, and 50–54. In these instances, the adjustment process made little difference. For each of the remaining age groups, their net mean scores lay outside of the gross mean's confidence interval, suggesting that controlling for compositional characteristics appears to have had an appreciable effect.
As a way of summing up this part of the findings, the net means reported in Table 2 for both the 16-type analysis and the 14-type analysis are presented in Fig. 1. Apart from average membership levels for the analysis of 14 types of associations being consistently but unsurprisingly lower for each age group than was the case with the analysis based on 16 types, the age-based membership curves are quite alike. Both show a decline in average number of memberships between the ages of 18–24 and 25–29, increasing levels through ages 55–59, a decrease from 55–59 to 60–64, and a relatively constant number of memberships through the 85+ age group. That the curve for the 14 types of associations appears to be flatter is supported by the respective betas (.164 for the 16 types and .106 for the 14 types), but both patterns are statistically significant by the F test for net effects (see Table 2 ). Fig. 1 also suggests that the exclusion of membership in church-related groups and in labor unions makes less difference at the younger ages, leads to a widening gap up through ages 55–59, and then to a constant difference thereafter. This impression is supported by the data in the far right column of Table 2 , which presents the simple differences between the net mean scores for the analysis based on 16 types and that based on 14 types. Generally, the magnitude of the differences increased up through age late 50s and then remained fairly steady, at least through the 80–84 age group. In other words, excluding church-related organizations and labor unions lowered the membership count of all age groups but had the least impact on membership levels of younger persons, a growing impact on overall affiliation rates up to the late middle-age period of the life course, and a uniform impact thereafter.
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Discussion |
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; Sundeen 1992; Van Willigen 2000). Yet, in recent years, some (Putnam 1995, Putnam 2000; Rotolo 1999) have asserted that rates are waning overall or for particular forms of participation. As far as older volunteers are concerned, some investigators point to overarching patterns of decline, whereas others report that with increases in life expectancy have come intensified searches for meaningful, perhaps even altruistic endeavors. Paradoxically, at the same time, volunteering is "marketed" as a valuable activity, a way to make a difference in deserving causes. In fact, a monitoring group, Independent Sector 1998, asserted that in 1995, $77.2 billion worth of voluntary services were contributed by older volunteers. Moreover, the number of nonprofit associations listed in the Encyclopedia of Associations was more than twice as great as it had been less than 30 years previously (Allard and Gruber 1998–99). As if any further evidence were needed, a spate of new popular books provides ample testimony that volunteering is alive and well. As far as older persons are concerned, rather than withdrawing from active participation, older persons seek and provide "pay back" through voluntary participation of one form or another (Cohen 2000; Freedman 2000; Roszak 1998).
Our data lead us to assert that voluntary association membership rises to a peak in ages 55–59 and remains reasonably stable until age 85, religious and/or union affiliations notwithstanding. Although our findings are contrary to what some have maintained (e.g., Fischer, Rapkin, and Rappaport 1991; Greeley 1997), we did not find that church-affiliated memberships or union memberships accounted for the stable pattern of membership (e.g., Lofland 1996; Wilson and Musick 1998).
To reach that conclusion, we aggregated data on various types of association membership among 16 types of associations over the 20-year period from 1974 to 1994 as collected in 12 national GSS surveys. Had we looked merely at the bivariate relationship between age and number of memberships, there would indeed have appeared to be a marked curvilinear relationship with a long, slow tapering off in the later years. However, from a multivariate perspective, the relationship was positive through ages 55–59 and, after a slight drop, continued pretty much as a plateau until the respondents were in the 85+ category. Further, membership in neither church-related associations nor unions appeared to exert a significant influence on the overall pattern.
One of the implications of our findings is that an extensive pool of volunteers is found among older segments of the population, and that they continue to be engaged to the extent that their stamina and vigor permit throughout the life course. In several respects, they are more engaged than many of their younger counterparts. Until their mid-80s, many older persons appear to remain involved. As has frequently been pointed out (Atchley 1999; Freedman 1997), older adults often search for options that may help them perceive themselves as both engaged in and contributing to some greater good. Our data imply that this is the case, as even when church affiliations and union memberships are controlled, high rates of voluntary association memberships persist well into the later years.
These results, of course, are based on an analysis of the number of types of voluntary associations to which people belong. As noted earlier, this approach likely underestimates the actual number of affiliations, given that persons may belong to more than one association within each type (Baumgartner and Walker 1988). More definitive estimates would require an enumeration of memberships within each of these general types. Memberships themselves also represent just one form of participation in voluntary associations. Further research on age differences should examine various modes and levels of involvement and activity. Finally, participation in the types of formal, voluntary associations considered in this study does not exhaust the range of ways in which voluntaristic contributions can be made. Only by casting the widest possible net of types of voluntaristic activities will we be able to fully appreciate the scope and magnitude of productive activities in the later years.
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Acknowledgments |
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Received for publication May 15, 2000. Accepted for publication October 27, 2000.
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This article has been cited by other articles:
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  T. D. Windsor, K. J. Anstey, and B. Rodgers Volunteering and Psychological Well-Being Among Young-Old Adults: How Much Is Too Much? Gerontologist, February 1, 2008; 48(1): 59 - 70. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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 J. Hendricks and S. J. Cutler Volunteerism and Socioemotional Selectivity in Later Life J. Gerontol. B. Psychol. Sci. Soc. Sci., September 1, 2004; 59(5): S251 - S257. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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