Factors influencing older adults’ participation in community volunteering service in China: a logistic regression and fsQCA perspective

With the increasingly noticeable aging trend in China, promoting active aging is critical to addressing the related challenges. It is essential to consider supporting older adults, ensuring their well-being, and facilitating their productive engagement with society. Volunteering serves as a vital means to achieve these goals. Building on this background, the paper investigates the factors that influence older adults' participation in community volunteering services. Drawing on capital theory, the study utilizes 9,473 samples from the 2020 China Longitudinal Aging Social Survey. Logistic regression is applied to analyze the factors influencing older adults' decisions to participate in community volunteering activities. Meanwhile, fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) is adopted to examine the pathways shaping high levels of community volunteering participation among older adults. The results show that several factors, such as human capital, social capital, cultural capital, and media capital, have a significant impact on older adults' participation in community volunteering activities. Further regression analyses examining moderating effects reveal notable differences in the factors associated with participation between urban and rural areas and among different gender and age groups of older adults. In contrast, the fsQCA analysis identifies two core configurational types to encourage older adults' participation in volunteering activities: the individual ability type and the social integration type. This study further employs subgroup fsQCA configurational analysis to verify the different configurations across groups. These differences, along with the grouping heterogeneity observed in the logistic regression analysis, collectively confirm that resource-poor groups face additional structural constraints when participating in community public affairs. Based on these analyses, this paper proposes policy recommendations in three key areas: improving older adults' support systems, promoting social integration among older adults, and establishing supportive compensation mechanisms.