Continuing the self: Role reconfiguration and life extension — Identity maintenance and generativity through volunteering

This study investigates how pre-volunteering professional identity shapes post-volunteering identity among older adults, testing whether career continuity, participation motivation, and eudaimonic outcomes mediate this relation. Using 701 volunteers from three national cultural institutions in Taiwan, we applied structural equation modeling with robust estimation, parceled indicators to manage model complexity, and bootstrapped confidence intervals (5,000 resamples) to test indirect effects. Extensive robustness checks included alternative model specifications, outlier sensitivity tests, and common-method variance diagnostics. Measurement models exhibited excellent fit (CFI = .969; RMSEA = .061). The structural model revealed a strong pathway from pre-volunteering identity to career continuity (β = .854) and from career continuity to post-volunteering identity (β = .577). The dominant indirect effect (pre-volunteering identity → career continuity → post-volunteering identity) was large and robust (standardized indirect ≈.49; bootstrap CI excluded zero). Pathways involving participation motivation and eudaimonic outcomes were weak or non-significant. Importantly, diagnostics revealed substantial common-method variance (first factor = 75%) and model sensitivity to extreme values. We therefore interpret results conservatively: identity continuity in later-life volunteering is principally driven by opportunities to enact prior skills rather than by subjective well-being alone. Practical implications emphasize volunteer role design that aligns tasks with prior expertise. Future research should employ multi-wave, multi-source designs to mitigate shared-method bias and clarify causal ordering.