Featured Topic: Volunteering

Featured Topic: Volunteering

As the end of another year approaches, many of us start to think about what’s ahead and how we’ll spend our time. New Year’s resolutions span various aspects of life, with one common theme being volunteering, whether in the form of time, money, skills, or other resources. For over two decades, SBP Journal authors have been investigating the experience and predictors of volunteering behavior.

Timmer and Aartsen (2003) classed volunteering as a productive behavior that offers opportunities for personal and interpersonal enrichment, and examined its uptake among adults aged 55–75 years. Against the authors’ expectation, a general sense of mastery was not a significant predictor of making the choice to start volunteering. Rather, having an interest in undertaking new challenges and experiences, and using that as momentum were enough to get the participants started. In terms of motives for beginning to volunteer, Kim and Um (2016) found that the effect of social recognition was especially prominent among individuals with low (vs. high) cause involvement and high (vs. low) self-efficacy.

The nature of volunteer activities also influence willingness to participate. Guo and Chen (2022) divided volunteering behavior into two categories: organized volunteering, comprising formal activities like community service organized by a school, and personal volunteering, as a more informal way of offering direct assistance, such as by helping a neighbor or friend. They found that personal, compared to organized, volunteering was significantly more common among adolescents. In a slightly older population of college students, Ma et al. (2025) indicated that motivation for volunteering was a direct predictor of sense of social responsibility. Further, this motivation indirectly predicted students’ sense of social responsibility via the independent, but not chain, mediators of volunteering participation frequency and self-worth.

Sustaining volunteer behavior has its own set of considerations. Finkelstein et al. (2005) reported that the strongest predictors of both time spent on volunteering and length of service were identity and perceived expectations. In a later study, Finkelstein (2008) further observed that satisfaction predicted the amount of time spent volunteering but not volunteer longevity, even when participants reported feeling that they were fulfilling their motivations for helping. Meanwhile, Wang (2022) explored whether sporting megaevents like the Olympic Games can be leveraged to promote sustained volunteering behavior. Perceived benefits and role identity were found to have an impact on the intended outcome.

Diverging from the trend of examining exclusively positive outcomes, Zhang (2024) challenged the default assumption that volunteering has a positive effect on mental health, reporting that, in fact, it was linked to heightened depressive symptoms, although familial trust and higher autonomy moderated this link. These findings offer greater nuance in understanding volunteer behavior in light of familial and other contextual factors.

Other papers in our archives and scheduled for forthcoming publication compare volunteering behavior in different cultural settings (individualistic vs. collectivistic) and examine how proenvironmental tendencies relate to prosocial behaviors like volunteering. Keen to continue tracking the evolving research trends in this area from a behavioral and social psychology perspective? Sign up for a personal subscription to SBP to gain access to several thousand papers spanning the fields of social, behavioral, and developmental psychology.

Mastery beliefs and productive leisure activities in the third age – Erika Timmer and Marja Aartsen, 2003, 31(7), 643–656.

Recognition in social media for supporting a cause: Involvement and self-efficacy as moderators – Sojung Kim and Nam-Hyun Um, 2016, 44(11), 1863–1878.

Effects of civic education on adolescents’ organized and personal volunteering: Mediating role of civic interest – Suran Guo and Hongmin Chen, 2022, 50(12), Article e11882.

The relationship between college students’ voluntary participation motivation and social responsibility – Hong Ma, Jingkun Zhou, Yafen Hao, and Zhen Fu, 2025, 53(6), Article e14282.

Motive, role identity, and prosocial personality as predictors of volunteer activity – Marcia A. Finkelstein, Louis A. Penner, and Michael T. Brannick, 2005, 33(4), 403–418.

Volunteer satisfaction and volunteer action: A functional approach – Marcia A. Finkelstein, 2008, 36(1), 9–18.

Leveraging the Olympic volunteer legacy: From perceived benefits to sustained volunteer behavior – Yan Wang, 2022, 50(8), Article e11610.

Volunteer participation and depression: Interplay of familial trust and autonomy – Yujie Zhang, 2024, 52(8), Article e13452.