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Inequality and Volunteering during COVID-19

Author(s): Lærke Høgenhaven

Thursday 15  |   10:00-10:20

Room: TP43

Session: Social stratification and inequality

This paper aims at examining the relationship between volunteering and inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark. Most research on volunteering focus on individuals engaging in volunteer work, and find positive correlations between volunteering and a number of positive outcomes e.g. physical health, mental health and well-being (Burr et al. 2021; Detollenaere et al. 2017). To my knowledge, the same research does not exist concerning the recipients of volunteer help. With this paper, I want to add to the literature by including the recipients of volunteer help in addition to those engaged in volunteer work. I am able to do this, because COVID-19 offers a unique opportunity to examine possible benefits of receiving volunteer help. During the pandemic, many new needs arose due to different public offers shutting temporarily down. This resulted in volunteer work aimed 1:1 at specific individuals like grocery shopping, childcare or financial aid, making the recipients of volunteer work more easily observable and measureable. To examine the possible relationship between volunteering and inequality, I focus on psychical and mental health as these were likely affected by the pandemic’s disruption of everyday life and habits (Vindegaard & Benros 2020). I thus seek to answer the following research question: What is the relationship between volunteering and mental and psychical health for those volunteering and those receiving volunteer help during COVID-19? To answer this research question, I draw on Danish cross sectional survey data (n=3.557) and four waves of longitudinal survey data (n=1.377) collected during 2020 and 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. The survey includes a wide range of items measuring respondents’ attitudes, beliefs and volunteer actions during the pandemic including self-reported health and different measures of anxiety relating to the pandemic. The analysis consists of two parts. First, I perform logistic regressions to examine possible differences in health between respondents engaging in volunteering and those who do not. I do the same for respondents who receive adequate volunteer help to meet their needs and those who do not. Second, I use fixed effect models to trace within differences in health outcomes for both volunteers’ and recipients of volunteer help over time during the pandemic. I discuss the results of the analysis concerning the impact of volunteering on health inequality in light of the pandemic. Further, I discuss the importance of including recipients of volunteer help when examining the relationship between volunteering and health inequality.