VOLUNTARY SOCIAL-PARTICIPATION AND HEALTH

The importance of participation in voluntary formal associations for e nhancing health is supported by four kinds of evidence. (1) Seven pros pective studies of social relations and mortality show the independent effect of formal social participation, net of informal ties. (2) Conc eptual analysis demonstrates that voluntary formal associations consti tute a separate class of social causation. (3) Our factor analysis of data from a sample of 629 nonmetropolitan elderly identified two types of formal social participation: ''instrumental,'' as in associations that are community oriented, and ''expressive,'' as in those that exis t for the benefit of the members. (4) Regression analysis showed that the instrumental participation factor is linked, net of controls, to t he perceived health of both men and women, whereas the expressive fact or predicts for women only.