Coping with occupational uncertainty and formal volunteering across the life span

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2014.05.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We address the implications of occupational uncertainty for formal volunteering.

  • We consider career stages and ways of coping with occupational uncertainty.

  • Our analyses draw on cross-sectional and 1-year follow-up data from Germany.

  • Engagement coping predicts more volunteering among young labor market entrants.

  • Disengagement has negative effects in younger and positive effects in older workers.

Abstract

Common wisdom suggests that individuals confronted with occupational uncertainty (e.g., job insecurity and difficulties with career planning) may withdraw from volunteering. We argue that volunteering may be useful to workers in some career stages and that stage-appropriate coping with occupational uncertainty may increase individuals' readiness to volunteer. In Study 1, we used cross-sectional and 1-year follow-up data from Germany that covered three age groups: 16–29 (NT1 = 1253, NT2 = 224), 30–43 (NT1 = 1560, NT2 = 371), and 56–75 (NT1 = 518, NT2 = 215). High engagement and low disengagement in coping with occupational uncertainty were associated with concurrent volunteering in the youngest group but not in the other groups. Over 1 year, high disengagement reduced the likelihood of starting volunteering in the youngest group and increased this likelihood in the oldest group. Study 2 used an independent, cross-sectional German sample that included two age groups: 20–29 (N = 326) and 30–40 (N = 367). Using a different measure of volunteering, Study 2 partly replicated the cross-sectional findings from Study 1. Results suggest that individual agency is a decisive link between occupational uncertainty and the readiness to volunteer, particularly among young labor market entrants.

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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