Caregiving, volunteering, and loneliness in middle-aged and older adults: a systematic review

Older adults contribute vast amounts of care to society, yet it remains unclear how unpaid productive activities relate to loneliness. The objective of this systematic review is to synthesise the evidence for associations between midlife and older people's unpaid productive activities (i.e., spousal and grandparental caregiving, volunteering) and loneliness.

Peer-reviewed observational articles that investigated the association between loneliness and caregiving or volunteering in later life (>50 years) were searched on electronic databases (Ovid MEDLINE, Embase, PsychInfo and Global Health) from inception until July 2021. Studies were analysed using narrative synthesis and assessed for methodological quality applying the Newcastle Ottawa Scale.

A total of 28 articles from 21 countries with 191,652 participants were included (52.5% women). Results were separately discussed for the type of unpaid productive activity, namely, general caregiving (N = 10), spousal caregiving (N = 7), grandparental caregiving (N = 7), and volunteering (N = 6). Risk of bias assessments revealed a moderate to high quality of included studies. Loneliness was positively associated with spousal caregiving but negatively associated with caregiving to grandchildren and volunteering.

Grandparental caregiving and volunteering may be promising avenues for reducing loneliness in older age. Future studies will need to distinguish between different types of caregiving and volunteering and explore more complex longitudinal designs with diverse samples to investigate causal relationships with loneliness.