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Social Participation in Poland: Links to Emotional Well-Being and Risky Alcohol Consumption

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Abstract

Social participation has been hypothesised to have both positive and negative impact on health outcomes via a variety of pathways, but previous studies have found few significant effects of social participation, and there is a lack of research from post-communist societies, which are known to be low on social capital. Using cross-sectional data from Poland on 2,970 individuals surveyed in 2009, we investigated the individual-level relationships between formal and informal social participation, emotional well-being, and risky alcohol consumption while controlling for demographic variables, socioeconomic status, employment and partnership status, health, religiosity, and generalised trust. Frequent joint activities with friends and neighbours were related to higher positive affect but also to more risky alcohol consumption. Membership in voluntary organisations was associated with more risky alcohol consumption, especially among younger males and for certain types of organisations. In contrast, volunteer work was related to higher positive affect and fewer depressive symptoms in the whole sample and to less risky alcohol consumption among the younger participants. The findings illustrate that some types of social participation, even if they are not typical of a given context (e.g., volunteering in Poland), may be more beneficial than others.

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Acknowledgments

This study was conducted during the postdoctoral fellowship of the first author at the Jena Graduate School “Human Behaviour in Social and Economic Change” (GSBC), which was funded by the Federal Programme “ProExzellenz” of the Free State of Thuringia. The Jena Study on Social Change and Human Development (PI: Rainer K. Silbereisen) was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as a subproject of the Collaborative Research Center 580 “Social Developments in Post-Socialistic Societies: Discontinuity, Tradition, Structural Formation” [SFB580-04-C6]. The project “Sociological and psychological determinants of coping with rapid social changes in Poland” was funded by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education (Poland), grant N116 107734. We thank Melanie Ellis and Michał Sitek for their useful comments on the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Applied Developmental Science (CADS), Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Semmelweisstr. 12, 07743, Jena, Germany

    Maria K. Pavlova & Rainer K. Silbereisen

  2. Polish Educational Research Institute, Górczewska 8, 01-180, Warsaw, Poland

    Kamil Sijko

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  1. Maria K. Pavlova
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  2. Rainer K. Silbereisen
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  3. Kamil Sijko
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Correspondence to Maria K. Pavlova.

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Pavlova, M.K., Silbereisen, R.K. & Sijko, K. Social Participation in Poland: Links to Emotional Well-Being and Risky Alcohol Consumption. Soc Indic Res 117, 29–44 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-013-0332-9

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