Segundo momento de la jurisprudencia relativa al Derecho al Agua

Voluntary work merits special consideration as a leisure activity in retirement,

because of its enormous potential value for society as well as its important benefits for the volunteer.

There is substantial evidence that participation in voluntary work is correlated with well-being (Bowen, Noack, & Staudinger, 2011; Kim & Moen, 2001). For instance, a study of low-income older adults, (Dulin & Hill, 2003), found that volunteering was related to positive emotions. Research suggests that voluntary work can give older people’s lives new meaning, not only through directly helping the community, but also through the opportunity to act as a mentor for younger volunteers (Settersen, 2002). Volunteering may also benefit physical health. In one study (Luoh & Herzog, 2002),with participants in their 70s and older, those who did a substantial amount of voluntary work lived longer and stayed healthier than did other participants, even when pre-existing health status and other likely confounding variables were controlled for statistically.The main difference in health outcome measures was between

individuals who did more than 100 hours of volunteer work annually and those who did less or none. The researchers suggest that this apparent threshold effect may indirectly reflect the nature of voluntary work’s impact on the self-concept, i.e., most of the potential enhancement of the self-concept, and the consequent health benefits, from doing voluntary work might be gained by doing an average of about two hours a week (Luoh & Herzog, 2002).

From the productive ageing perspective, formal volunteering by retired people should be promoted even more than it is now. Society will increasingly depend on retired people to do voluntary work. Workers have limited time to volunteer nowadays, because of such factors as high female participation in the workforce and long working hours. Most of adulthood has been described as a period of “time famine” (Freedman, 1999). Some organizations will need to find better ways of attracting, training and supporting retired people as volunteers.

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Freedman points out the irony that while older people seem to be especially civic minded (i.e., they vote and donate more than younger people, and say that they want to be more involved in the community), in reality, they actually seem to volunteer less than other age groups. However, most research into retired adults’ voluntary work only considers formal volunteering for organisations. There is evidence that retired adults do a lot of informal unpaid work for their families and communities.

(Warburton & McLaughlin, 2005; Warburton, McLaughlin, & Pinsker, 2006).

Summary

For many people, retirement brings more free time than they have ever had, and the use which they make of this free time is an important determinant of life satisfaction. Retirement is not generally an unhappy stage of life, but for many people it could probably be enhanced by engaging in serious, committed leisure activities.

One big problem is that many people reach retirement without having developed strong leisure interests. There is a need for earlier and more intensive preparation for retirement leisure. The leisure careers literature tells us that it is unrealistic to expect any quick fixes from policy initiatives (Roberts, 1999). Big changes in population leisure patterns are likely to take decades. Children need to be introduced to the choices and potential satisfactions of leisure activities, and methods such as

membership of organizations are required to help them stay involved and committed in worthwhile leisure activities (Roberts, 1999). People can go on developing new interests through life, but these are likely to be based on existing interests, so early leisure socialization is vital. But some short-term measures are probably worthwhile. For instance, there is scope for counselling retired individuals to find the sorts of leisure activity that will suit them best, in the same way that people are helped to choose their vocations (Whitbourne, 2005). Self-efficacy in leisure participation could be fostered in older people through role models and carefully graduated experiences.

From a social policy point of view, older people are still a largely untapped resource. Retired people will be increasingly needed to help run communities as volunteering

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by the general adult population has declined in recent years. Full encouragement should be given to initiatives to increase volunteering by retired people.

It does seem that society has yet to catch up with the new phenomenon of the third age. Some improvements such as greater opportunities in lifelong education are taking place, but so far these changes mainly benefit a privileged minority of older people.

What of the future? As Freedman (1999) argues, retirement leisure is likely to change as it passes into the hands of the baby boom generation. The people who will retire in the near future are better educated, wealthier, and healthier, than earlier cohorts of retired people. Above all, they have higher expectations and the weight of numbers to be a powerful pressure group. They will resist relegation to the margins of society. Therefore, new arrangements and pathways to retirement are required to consider the contemporary factors and contexts (Sargent, Lee, Martin, & Zikic, 2013).

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