Comparing the psychological impacts of formal and informal volunteering: empirical insights from the South Korean context

This paper investigates how formal and informal volunteering influence life satisfaction and self-efficacy, using data from the 2023 National Survey of Volunteering in South Korea. To control selection bias, we applied propensity score weighting, generalised boosted models, and doubly robust regression. The findings indicate that while both formal and informal volunteering positively affect life satisfaction and self-efficacy, their impacts differ. Informal volunteering has a stronger positive effect on life satisfaction, whereas formal volunteering is more effective in enhancing self-efficacy. These results suggest that formal and informal volunteering differ not only in structure but also in the mechanisms shaping life satisfaction and self-efficacy. Our findings contribute to the literature on volunteering by offering new insights into how different types of volunteer activity produce varying psychological outcomes and provides practical implications for volunteer management and program development.