Health outcomes of Experience Corps®: A high-commitment volunteer program

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Abstract

Experience Corps® (EC) is a high-commitment US volunteer program that brings older adults into public elementary schools to improve academic achievement of students. It is viewed as a health promotion program for the older volunteers. We evaluated the effects of the EC program on older adults’ health, using a quasi-experimental design. We included volunteers from 17 EC sites across the US. They were pre-tested before beginning their volunteer work and post-tested after two years of service. We compared changes over time between the EC participants (n = 167) and a matched comparison group of people from the US Health and Retirement Study (2004, 2006). We developed the comparison group by using the nearest available Mahalanobis metric matching within calipers combined with the boosted propensity scores of those participating in the EC. We corrected for clustering effects via survey regression analyses with robust standard errors and calculated adjusted post-test means of health outcomes, controlling for all covariates and the boosted propensity score of EC participants. We found that compared to the comparison group, the EC group reported fewer depressive symptoms and functional limitations after two years of participation in the program, and there was a statistical trend toward the EC group reporting less decline in self-rated health. Results of this study add to the evidence supporting high-intensity volunteering as a social model of health promotion for older adults.

Section snippets

Health effects of volunteering

The positive association of volunteering and well-being among older adults has been well-documented (CNCS, 2007). Volunteering has been associated with the following outcomes: lower mortality (Musick, Herzog, & House, 1999), higher physical function (Lum and Lightfoot, 2005, Moen et al., 1992), higher self-rated health (Morrow-Howell, Hinterlong, Rozario, & Tang, 2003), fewer depressive symptoms (Musick & Wilson, 2003), lower pain (Arnstein, Vidal, Wells-Federman, Morgan, & Caudill, 2002), and

Overview of the Experience Corps® program

The Experience Corps® program is a national program, with a Chief Executive Officer and program staff in Washington, DC. Local communities implement EC programs, which are usually hosted at the city level by nonprofit or public agencies. For example, a nonprofit organization, Generations Incorporated, Inc. operates a program in Boston; the South East Texas Regional Planning Commission, a voluntary association of local governments, operates a program in Port Arthur, Texas; and the City Community

Research design

We used a quasi-experimental two-group pre-post test design to assess outcomes associated with participation in the EC program. We could not establish a randomly assigned control group or a waitlist control group because there are more students referred to the program than there are EC volunteers. The program recruits, trains, and places volunteers well into the school year, and still there are students referred by teachers who cannot participate due to lack of available tutors (Morrow-Howell,

Missing data

Missing data were imputed separately for high-volunteer and comparison groups using Markov Chain Monte Carlo Multiple Imputation to complete all missing values of the study variables (Allison, 2002). The EC data set had missing values less than 5% of the time across all the study variables. In the HRS, some variables (education, income, and depression) had missing values 20%–28% of the time. Using multiple covariates related to these missing values, the imputation method created five different

Characteristics of EC and HRS comparison sample

As shown in Table 1, no statistical differences in pre-test variables were found between the EC group and the HRS comparison group, with the exception of education. For both groups, average age of the sample was 65 years. Females comprised over 80% of the sample, and most were not working. About 60% were non-white. About half of each group had volunteered before the observation period of this study (50% of EC volunteers were volunteers before joining EC and 46% of comparisons had volunteered

Discussion

The study findings demonstrate that high-commitment volunteering produces enhanced health outcomes for older adults. This work is consistent with previous research on the positive effects of volunteering. Yet this work adds some insight regarding the health-promoting aspects of volunteering. First of all, it suggests that the intensity of volunteering may be important, given that the EC group committed 12 h per week on average to volunteering over the two year observation period while the

Acknowledgements

This project was funded by The Atlantic Philanthropies. The authors would like to acknowledge the staff members at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. for data collection services.

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