Date of Award

2025

Degree Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Psychology, PhD

Program

School of Social Science, Politics, and Evaluation

Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair

Saida Heshmati

Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member

Jason T. Siegel

Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member

P. Wesley Schultz

Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member

Jonathan J. Park

Terms of Use & License Information

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Rights Information

© 2025 Megan E Mansfield

Keywords

daily diary, emotional well-being, multi-level modeling, volunteering

Subject Categories

Psychology | Social Psychology

Abstract

Sustained engagement in prosocial behaviors, like volunteering is an evidence-supported facilitator of well-being. Volunteering and well-being are also dynamic processes unfolding over long and short timespans, which is well reflected in research on well-being (e.g., Heshmati et al., 2023) but less so in the research on volunteering. This is the case despite existing evidence demonstrating that dynamic changes in components of well-being, like emotions, are associated with engagement in particular behaviors including civic or prosocial behaviors (Hou & Bonanno, 2018; Snippe et al., 2017). Therefore, it would be reasonable to suspect that volunteering may have a similar dynamic relationship with well-being. I aimed to investigate this suspicion through a nuanced examination of volunteering behaviors in daily life and how they relate to components of well-being (i.e., affective states and social connectedness). Using the MIDUS 3 National Study of Daily Experience dataset ( N = 1, 236; Ryff & Almedia, 2022) I first examined individual differences in dynamic characteristics of change in positive and negative affect over an eight-day period in relation to daily volunteering behaviors (Study 1). Then I investigated – based on existing theory and empirical research – whether the associations between volunteering behaviors and affect in daily life were explained through feeling connected to others in those moments as well as the duration of these hypothesized effects (Study 2). Results from log transformed regression models used for Study 1 showed baseline (i.e., intraindividual means) levels of the affective states of calm ( b = 1.58, p < .01), satisfaction ( b = 0.63, p < .05), and jittery ( b = 0.49, p < .05) were significantly related to time spent volunteering. Also, intraindividual variability in the positive affective state of confidence ( b = 1.59, p < .05) and overall negative affective states ( b = 0.36, p < .05) were also significantly and negatively associated with time spent volunteering. These findings suggest that further research is needed for understanding the role of volunteer motivation in the dynamic relationship between volunteering and affect in daily life. For Study 2 multi-level mediation models supported the hypothesized partially mediating role of social connectedness between time spent volunteering and positive and negative affect, explaining over 70% of the total effect in both models. Vector auto-regression was used to examine the persistence of the effect of social connectedness on lagged values of affect; this effect lasted up to four days but there was no lagged effect on negative affect. Similarly, there was no sustained lagged effect of volunteering on any of the other variables. These findings underscore the importance of social connections in the volunteering process and provide a potential mechanism for explaining the association between volunteering and the affective components of well-being. Overall, this research provides evidence of a nuanced and complex relationship between volunteering and components of wellbeing experienced in daily life, underscoring the importance of using short timescales and dynamic approaches in investigating psychological phenomenon, like volunteering and wellbeing.

ISBN

9798314895511

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