Exploring factors influencing volunteer uptake in peer-volunteering active aging interventions within Bangladeshi and Chinese communities.

Background:
Peer-volunteering pairs active older adults with inactive ones to attend activities together, aiming to reduce major mobility limitations. A scoping review exploring the motivations of peer-volunteers in physical activity interventions indicated that most peer-volunteers are White, so our understanding of volunteering motivations of ethnic minorities is limited. This may be an issue in engaging minority groups as evidence suggests people prefer to be paired with someone of a similar background to themselves. Statistics suggest Asian people are less likely to volunteer than other ethnicities, highlighting the need to recruit from these communities to then reach inactive older adults of Asian ethnicities.

Purpose:
This research explored the experiences of helping others within these communities, and the barriers and facilitators that may impact volunteering uptake.

Methods:
Focus groups were conducted with people aged over 50 from the Chinese (N=16) and Bangladeshi (N=20) communities to explore barriers and facilitators to peer-volunteering, analysed using thematic analysis. Follow-up, individual interviews (Chinese N=5; Bangladeshi N=7) delved deeper into personal experiences and thoughts on peer-volunteering, using interpretive phenomenological analysis.

Results:
Pre-liminary themes highlight key barriers to becoming a peer-volunteer include financial, language, activity availability and prior commitments (including informal volunteering), with differences observed between ethnicities.

Conclusions:
Working with communities to ensure that these barriers can be addressed is imperative for recruitment of peer-volunteers. Establishing community based physical activity opportunities would help overcome many of the suggested barriers.

Practical implications:
Future intervention design should consider the barriers that people from diverse communities face. This would allow for active ageing interventions to be more successful in reaching a range of people from different ethnicities by building upon barriers and employing the community’s unique facilitators to these initiatives.

Funding:
This presentation presents independent research funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research Applied Research Collaboration-Greater Manchester (NIHR200174).