Voluntary Work in the Lives of Post-Retirement Adults

Abstract

The ability of an individual to adapt to either role loss or role gain when he or she enters a period of retirement is influenced by many factors and several attempts have been made to describe both successful and unsuccessful role adaptation. This study aimed to examine the relationship between leisure activities and life satisfaction in a sample of 40 retired adults, aged 60–83 years. The difference in life satisfaction and leisure activities in one group of 20 subjects who undertook volunteer work was compared with a second group of 20 subjects who did not undertake volunteer work. Three data collection instruments were used: a demographic questionnaire, a leisure activity questionnaire and a life satisfaction questionnaire. When Spearman's rank order correlation coefficient was applied to the data to examine the relationship between leisure activities and life satisfaction levels for the full sample of subjects, a positive correlation was found at the 5% level. However, when the groups were examined separately, only the non-volunteer group scores showed a positive relationship. In order to compare life satisfaction levels and leisure activity patterns of those subjects who participated in voluntary work with those who did not, the Mann Whitney test was applied to the data. The results for both groups were not significant at the 5% level.