Volunteer work among older adults in Denmark, 1997–2017: What can explain the continuous upward trend?

The present study assessed and explained trends in volunteer work among older adults in Denmark against the backdrop of stagnating participation rates in, for example, the USA. Data on volunteering were retrieved from the multidisciplinary Danish Longitudinal Study on Ageing and merged with information from administrative registries. Multiple imputation was used to correct for sample selection, and Blinder–Oaxaca decomposition was applied to analyse the development in volunteering from 1997 to 2017 for 6263 respondents aged 67–77. For this age group, volunteerism increased by 12% points, corresponding to an almost 50% increase from 1997 to 2017. Approximately a quarter of this increase was due to compositional changes, i.e. to changes in respondents’ characteristics between the 2 years, whereas three-quarters were due to changes in coefficients, i.e. to changes in the associations between the explanatory variables and volunteering over time. Thus, while larger shares of older adults had more resources in terms of higher levels of education and health in 2017 than in 1997, such resources were less important for volunteerism among Danish older adults in 2017. Despite concerns about declining civic-mindedness and empirical evidence on stagnating participation rates in many Anglo-Saxon countries, Denmark has succeeded in drawing an ever-broader range of older adults into volunteerism over the past decades. The extensive welfare state model and changing norms and perceptions of ageing may together have contributed to the large increase in old-age volunteerism in Denmark.