The health advantage of volunteering is larger for older and less healthy volunteers in Europe: a mega-analysis.

There is a vast literature on the health benefits associated with volunteering for volunteers. Such health advantages are likely to vary across groups of volunteers with different characteristics. The current paper aims to examine the health advantages of volunteering for European volunteers and explore heterogeneity in the association between volunteering and health. We carry out a mega-analysis on microdata from six panel surveys, covering 952,026 observations from 267,212 respondents in 22 European countries. We provide open access to the code we developed for data harmonization. We use ordinary least squares, fixed effects, first difference, and fixed effect quantile regressions to estimate how volunteering activities and changes therein are related to self-rated health for different groups. Our results indicate a small but consistently positive association between changes in volunteering and changes in health within individuals. This association is stronger for older adults. For respondents 60 years and older, within-person changes in volunteering are significantly related to changes in self-rated health. Additionally, the health advantage of volunteering is larger for respondents in worse health. The advantage is largest at the lowest decile and gradually declines along the health distribution. The magnitude of the association at the first decile is about twice the magnitude of the association at the ninth decile. These results suggest that volunteering may be more beneficial for the health of specific groups in society. With small health advantages from year to year, volunteering may protect older and less healthy adults from health decline in the long run. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10433-022-00691-5.

Altruism in blood donation: Out of sight out of mind? Closing donation centers influences blood donor lapse.

In this paper, we use register data on all blood donors (n = 259,172) and changes in geographical locations of blood donation centers in the Netherlands over the past decade, to examine the strength of altruistic motivations in blood donation by testing how blood donor behavior changes after the cost of donating in the form of time and inconvenience increases. We examined whether closing donation centers influences blood donor lapse, and whether the risk for lapse varies between donors with different blood groups. A lower lapsing risk for donors with universal, O-negative blood as costs increase is considered as evidence of altruism: continued efforts in making a societal impact despite the increased time commitment would indicate altruism in donor behavior. In the total sample, 137,172 (52.9%) donors lapsed at least once. We found a very strong effect of changes in the distance to the nearest collection point on donor lapse. Donors whose nearest donation center closed were 53% more likely to lapse than donors whose donation center remained open, with the risk for donor lapse increasing with each extra kilometer distance to the new nearest donation center. While O-negative donors were 10.5% less likely to lapse after closing a donation center compared to donors with other blood groups, the effect of closing was similar across blood groups. Based on these results, we conclude that blood donors are clearly sensitive to cost changes imposed by blood banks and that they are not particularly motivated by altruistic concerns. Future studies are recommended to further examine the role of contextual factors in motivational change across the blood donor career. Blood banks are advised to strategically place donation centers throughout the country to promote blood donations, and design interventions to reduce donation barriers after changing their donation centers' locations.

Life events and donor lapse among blood donors in Denmark.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The likelihood of donating blood changes over the life course, with life events shown to influence entry to and exit from the donor population. While these previous findings provide valuable insights for donor management, blood collection agencies need to be cautious about generalizing findings to other countries as blood donor behaviour is context-specific. To examine cross-country variations in donor behaviour, the repeatability of a previous Dutch study on life events and blood donor lapse is examined by using a sample of Danish donors. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Register data from Statistics Denmark was linked to the Scandinavian Donations and Transfusions database (n = 152 887). Logistic regressions were conducted to examine the association between life events in 2009-2012 and blood donor lapse in 2013-2014. RESULTS: Of the total sample, 69 079 (45·2%) donors lapsed. Childbirth and losing a job increased the lapsing risk by 11% and 16%, respectively, while health-related events in the family (i.e. blood transfusion, disease and death) decreased the lapsing risk by 5%, 7% and 9%, respectively. CONCLUSION: Life events are associated with donor lapse of Danish donors. These results are comparable to previous findings from the Netherlands (i.e. childbirth and labour market transitions increased lapsing risk; health-related events decreased lapsing risk), with two thirds of the associations being in the same direction. Differences between study results were mainly related to effect sizes and demographic compositions of the donor pools. We argue contextual factors to be of importance in blood donor studies.

Blood Donation across the Life Course: The Influence of Life Events on Donor Lapse.

This article examines how blood donation loyalty changes across the life course as a result of life events. Previous studies have shown that life events affect involvement in prosocial behavior, possibly as a result of loss of human and social capital. Using registry data from the blood collection agency in the Netherlands, linked to longitudinal survey data from the Donor InSight study (N = 20,560), we examined whether life events are related to blood donor lapse. Childbirth, losing a job, and starting a job increase the likelihood of donor lapse, while health-related events (i.e., blood transfusion in a family member, death of a family member) decrease the likelihood of donor lapse. Moreover, results showed how social and practical concerns explain donors' decisions to donate blood after the occurrence of life events. We discuss theoretical implications for further studies on prosocial and health-related behavior.

Buying time promotes happiness.

Around the world, increases in wealth have produced an unintended consequence: a rising sense of time scarcity. We provide evidence that using money to buy time can provide a buffer against this time famine, thereby promoting happiness. Using large, diverse samples from the United States, Canada, Denmark, and The Netherlands (n = 6,271), we show that individuals who spend money on time-saving services report greater life satisfaction. A field experiment provides causal evidence that working adults report greater happiness after spending money on a time-saving purchase than on a material purchase. Together, these results suggest that using money to buy time can protect people from the detrimental effects of time pressure on life satisfaction.

Individual, contextual and network characteristics of blood donors and non-donors: a systematic review of recent literature.

BACKGROUND: The ageing population and recent migration flows may negatively affect the blood supply in the long term, increasing the importance of targeted recruitment and retention strategies to address donors. This review sought to identify individual, network and contextual characteristics related to blood donor status and behaviour, to systematically discuss differences between study results, and to identify possible factors to target in recruitment and retention efforts. METHODS: The systematic review was conducted in accordance with a predefined PROSPERO protocol (CRD42016039591). After quality assessments by multiple independent raters, a final set of 66 peer-reviewed papers, published between October 2009 and January 2017, were included for review. RESULTS: Individual and contextual characteristics of blood donor status and behaviour were categorised into five main lines of research: donor demographics, motivations and barriers, adverse reactions and deferral, contextual factors, and blood centre factors. Results on donor demographics, motivations and barriers, and contextual factors were inconclusive, differing between studies, countries, and sample characteristics. Adverse reactions and deferral were negatively related to blood donor behaviour. Blood centre factors play an important role in donor management, e.g., providing information, reminders, and (non-)monetary rewards. No studies were found on network characteristics of (non-)donors. DISCUSSION: Although individual and contextual characteristics strongly relate to blood donor status and behaviour, mechanisms underlying these relations have not been studied sufficiently. We want to stress the importance of longitudinal studies in donor behaviour, exploring the role of life events and network characteristics within blood donor careers. Increased understanding of donor behaviour will assist policy makers of blood collection agencies, with the ultimate goal of safeguarding a sufficient and matching blood supply.

Principle of Care and Giving to Help People in Need.

Theories of moral development posit that an internalized moral value that one should help those in need-the principle of care-evokes helping behaviour in situations where empathic concern does not. Examples of such situations are helping behaviours that involve cognitive deliberation and planning, that benefit others who are known only in the abstract, and who are out-group members. Charitable giving to help people in need is an important helping behaviour that has these characteristics. Therefore we hypothesized that the principle of care would be positively associated with charitable giving to help people in need, and that the principle of care would mediate the empathic concern-giving relationship. The two hypotheses were tested across four studies. The studies used four different samples, including three nationally representative samples from the American and Dutch populations, and included both self-reports of giving (Studies 1-3), giving observed in a survey experiment (Study 3), and giving observed in a laboratory experiment (Study 4). The evidence from these studies indicated that a moral principle to care for others was associated with charitable giving to help people in need and mediated the empathic concern-giving relationship. © 2016 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology.