Coping with occupational uncertainty and formal volunteering across the life span
Section snippets
Paid work and formal volunteering across the life span
In his life-span, life-space theory of career development, Super (1957; Super, Savickas, & Super, 1996) famously argued that individuals' careers follow the same general pattern across the life span: growth (ca. ages 4–13), exploration (14–24), establishment (25–44), maintenance (45–65), and decline/disengagement (65 +). Each career stage is defined more by its specific developmental tasks than it is by individuals' age, because there is large variability in the particular tasks faced by
Coping with occupational uncertainty and formal volunteering across the life span
Occupational uncertainty does not affect everyone in the same way. Individuals differ in their perceptions of occupational uncertainty, and its consequences depend on their reactions (Pinquart and Silbereisen, 2004, Silbereisen and Chen, 2010). Drawing on the motivational theory of life-span development (Heckhausen, Wrosch, & Schulz, 2010) and on the transactional stress theory (Lazarus & Folkman, 1984), Silbereisen and colleagues proposed that, when opportunities for pursuing work-related
The present studies
In Germany, strong employment and unemployment protection used to be a norm, which lowered the risks of job loss and related financial strain but led to the insider–outsider division on the labor market. Over the past decades, policy makers have fostered the creation of part-time, fixed-term, and low-paid jobs (Eichhorst & Marx, 2011). These jobs are taken by the least protected workers, including labor market entrants and older unemployed individuals (Hofäcker et al., 2010). In response to
Participants and procedure
We used data from two samples. The first included participants aged 16–43, who were surveyed from October 2005 to January 2006 (T1) in four federal states of Germany. Within sampling points, which were selected at random from a stratified area sample, target households were identified with a random route technique. Altogether, 2863 standardized face-to-face interviews lasting about an hour were conducted by a professional survey agency (response rate 77.0%). This sample was fairly
Participants and procedure
Participants aged 20–40 were drawn from two federal states of the former East Germany via random digit dialing (RDD). The sample was stratified by regional administrative units and age. Computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) were conducted from October 2010 to January 2011 by the trained personnel of the CATI laboratory at the University of Jena, Germany. Without a correction for respondents' unknown eligibility, we estimated a response rate at only 5.0%; with this correction, we
General discussion
In the present article, we attempted to determine whether growing occupational uncertainty (e.g., job insecurity, career instability, and difficulties with career planning; Hofäcker et al., 2010, Kalleberg, 2011) poses a general threat to one form of civic participation, namely formal volunteering (Carnoy, 2000, Voydanoff, 2007). Whereas previous sociological studies from the U.S. answer this question affirmatively (Brand and Burgard, 2008, Rotolo and Wilson, 2003, Wilensky, 1961, Wilson and
Acknowledgments
This study was partly conducted during the postdoctoral fellowship of the first author at the Jena Graduate School “Human Behaviour in Social and Economic Change” (GSBC) funded by the Federal Programme “ProExzellenz” of the Free State of Thuringia (grant number 002-2-1). The Jena Study on Social Change and Human Development (PI: Rainer K. Silbereisen), which was used in Study 1, and the survey “Demography and Democracy — Regional Characteristics of Demographic Change, Individual Developmental
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