Why are there so many elderly volunteers in Taiwan? The author hypothesizes and
proves that the local culture has distinctive features which explain the phenomenon of
active engagement in volunteering among elderly of Taiwan.
Through different methods of research, volunteers were measured in terms of
factors which could be predominant in motivating a person to volunteer, such as: sex,
language, age, educational background, religiosity, familism. Through INDCOL scale
the author proves that Taiwanese society is indeed collective and specifically -
horizontally oriented. The study explains that Taiwanese people are therefore culturally
wired to exhibit altruism, which positively influences volunteerism. Participating in an
exploratory survey volunteers, give a prove to it through self-reported motivation in
which altruism gets majority.
Apart from altruism, other cultural values that are cultivated through generations,
such as: religiosity and familism, when embedded into collective society - which is
silver-lined with interdependence and communalism - are predominant factors which
may be inducing volunteerism on the island according to the author’s exploratory study.
