Helping in times of crisis: Examining the social identity and wellbeing impacts of volunteering duringCOVID‐19

Abstract

COVID‐19 produced the largest mass mobilisation of collective helping in a generation. Currently, the impact of this voluntary activity is not well understood, particularly for specific groups of volunteers (e.g., new vs. existing) and for different amounts of voluntary activity. Drawing on social psychological work on collective helping, and work from the Social Identity Approach to Health, we seek to address this gap through an analysis of survey data from 1,001 adults living in the south of England (333 men; 646 women; age range = 16–85) during the first UK lockdown. Measures included time spent volunteering pre‐/post‐COVID, community identification, subjective wellbeing, and volunteering intentions. Those who volunteered during COVID‐19 reported higher levels of community identification than those who did not. However, subjective wellbeing benefits were only found for those volunteers who maintained the same level of volunteering (in terms of time) pre‐and post‐COVID lockdown. New volunteers showed significantly lower levels of wellbeing when they were undertaking 5 or more hours of volunteering a week. Our findings provide unique insight into the variable relationship with wellbeing for different groups of volunteers, as well as how the experiences and functioning of ‘crisis’ volunteering are different from volunteering during ‘normal’ times.

Articles from and inspired by the fifth International Conference on Social Identity and Health

“…For these older adults, government messaging confirmed negative stereotypes of helplessness and dependency, regardless of their physical condition and deprived them of the active prosocial roles (and associated group memberships) within their local communities that gave many of them a sense of meaning and purpose in retirement. Relatedly, and supporting Donnellan, Bradshaw, and McMahon's (2023) findings regarding the group‐related processes through which volunteering can positively predict health and well‐being in the context of a text‐based crisis support line, Gray, Randell, Manning, and Cleveland's (2023) survey work on volunteering during the pandemic highlights how this prosocial group engagement benefitted some volunteers, but not all of them. Longstanding volunteers evidenced identity and well‐being benefits, but new volunteers who took on significant volunteering responsibilities suffered exhaustion and burnout.…”

“…As noted above, Byrne et al's (2023) theoretically guided metareview highlights how the structure and organisation of prison life serves to inhibit help‐seeking for mental health problems, while Wakefield et al's (2024) study of veterans' experiences notes how the ethos and policies of the military can inhibit or even undermine the efforts of retiring service personnel to socially reintegrate. Likewise, both Harkin et al (2023) and Gray et al's (2023) papers on the effects of COVID‐19 on local communities point to the importance of the local community infrastructure in facilitating or inhibiting active involvement, while Filippi, Peters, and Suitner's (2023) paper documents the relationships between organisational decision‐making ethos and the well‐being of employees in the United States, United Kingdom and Italy. By engaging with structural factors which provide opportunities or barriers to social connectedness, these studies enable a fuller appreciation of the many social and environmental ‘determinants of health’ impacting on Social Cure processes.…”

Pre- and post-pandemic attitudes toward participation in community-based initiatives: The case of Poznań

“…As an example of crisis or disaster it triggered a significant grassroots response on a global scale (Sitrin & Colectiva Sembrar, 2020;Marvi et al, 2021). Some researchers even characterize the pandemic period as the greatest social mobilization of this generation (Gray et al, 2023). However, because of its specific features like a long-term infection threat, COVID-19 pandemic also influenced and transformed traditional mobilization factors, which was revealed by a growing body of research on that matter (Vezzali et al, 2022).…”

“…133-152 manufacturing protective masks, organizing remote learning equipment for children, and offering numerous other methods of support for those in need (Sitrin & Colectiva Sembrar, 2020;Carstensen et al, 2021;Fransen et al, 2022). Numerous publications on community resilience, mutual aid initiatives, and solidarity provide evidence of the massive social mobilization during the recent pandemic in response to the multidimensional social and economic crisis (Gray et al, 2023).…”

Advancing science and creating a scientifically informed community at JCASP

“…The editorial team welcomes research from all areas of community and social psychology. We accept empirical, theoretical, and methodological articles, and welcome a wide range of methodologies, including quantitative (Pecini et al, 2022), qualitative (Varma & Siromahov, 2023), and mixed methods research (Kothari, Fischer, Mullican, Lipscomb, & Jaramillo, 2022), as well as correlational (Gray, Randell, Manning, & Cleveland, 2023), longitudinal (Joshanloo, 2022), and experimental designs (Mäkinen et al, 2022). Relatedly, we have expanded the types of articles that we accept.…”