Buffering effects of volunteering on the link between negative life events and adults' life satisfaction: Disentangling within- and between-person effects

This study explores how volunteering buffers the association between negative life events and life satisfaction using data from two longitudinal surveys: HILDA (30,693 participants, one-year intervals) and SOEP (60,701 participants, two-year intervals). We applied multiple-group random intercept cross-lagged panel models to examine how volunteering moderates the effects between dependent negative life events (partially controllable), independent negative life events (uncontrollable) and life satisfaction. Participants were categorized as low- or high-level volunteers, with high-level defined as volunteering at least one hour per week (HILDA) or once per week (SOEP). For low-level volunteers, dependent events and life satisfaction negatively reinforced each other, creating a vicious cycle. High-level volunteering disrupted this cycle over two-year intervals, preventing long-term declines in life satisfaction and reducing future dependent events. Independent events had no lasting effect in the two-year intervals on life satisfaction, regardless of the volunteer level, which is consistent with the set-point theory. However, high-level volunteering accelerated recovery over one-year intervals and disrupted stability of independent negative life events over two-year intervals. At the between-person level, volunteering moderated the relationship between independent events and life satisfaction over two years, but not for dependent events. These findings highlight volunteering's protective role in resilience and well-being, emphasizing the need to differentiate between within- and between-person effects and consider varying time frames in longitudinal research. • Volunteering may help individuals recover more quickly when life gets tough. • Uncontrollable negative events don't reduce individuals' life satisfaction for long. • However, volunteering makes it faster to bounce back. • Volunteering benefits differ between population and individual levels.