Disrupted Community Involvement? Changes in Civic Engagement across Life Events

Active voluntary involvement in civic organizations like sports clubs, cultural associations, and neighborhood groups is a cornerstone of community life and can boost individuals’ social integration, alleviate loneliness, and foster community cohesion. The extent to which individuals are voluntarily involved in community affairs follows an inverse u-shaped pattern across the life course. Existing research confirms this empirical regularity and even shows that certain life stages (e.g., marriage, parenthood) are associated with changes in voluntary involvement. Yet, although it has become clear that voluntary involvement has become more sporadic and volatile in recent decades, we still know little about how voluntary involvement changes in the immediate aftermath of major life course events that may have the potential to accelerate or disrupt individuals' civic trajectories. Such events typically do not only change individuals' priorities and time constraints; they also shape their integration into wider community networks, which in turn affect their probability to get involved.

In this study, we apply a novel method that exploits month-specific information (Hudde and Jacob 2023) to the ‘United Kingdom Household Longitudinal Study’ (UKHLS) data to examine rapid changes in voluntary involvement surrounding seven major life course events: child birth, marriage, divorce, entry into widowhood, residential mobility, labor market entry, and entry into retirement. This data allows us to analyze two outcomes: The number of hours volunteered in the last 4 weeks and the number of active group memberships. Our findings underscore how some life exert an immediate influence on voluntary involvement while other life course effects take more time. Moreover, it allows us to depict heterogeneity in the durability in life course effects across the different outcome variables and subgroups. These findings can inform not only social scientists but also practitioners in civil society and policymakers.