No abstract

The failure of a substantial portion of mail survey recipients to respond to invitations to participate in research projects raises issues of nonresponse error. Because this error is difResearchers who study nonprofit organizations draw on a wide range of empirical research methods. One common approach-geared toward comparing the same information for a large number of cases-is the survey research method. The general approach involves defining a population of

Every 4 years, the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University conducts a telephone survey (called Indiana Gives) of the giving and volunteering behaviors of Indiana citizens. In preparing to conduct Indiana Gives for 2000, a larger methodological question was asked: How much does survey methodology matter in generating accurate measures of giving and volunteering? In this most recent wave of the Indiana survey, conducted inOctober and November 2000, eight groups of approximately 100 randomly selected Indiana residents were asked to complete one of eight surveys related to giving and volunteering. It was found that the longer the module and the more detailed its prompts, the more likely a household was to recall making any charitable contribution and the higher the average level of its giving. These differences persisted even after controlling for differences in age, educational attainment, income, household status, race, and gender. There is growing value and interest in measuring philanthropy at both the national and local levels. This is amply demonstrated by recent research at the state and national levels, such as studies on giving in

This study examines the effects of race and gender on philanthropy and interaction effects between race or gender and survey methodologies. Results indicate differences in philanthropic behaviors by gender but not by race. We also find significant interaction effects between survey methodologies and race and gender, which may have important implications for social science research in which race and/or gender explain or predict behaviors. Economic theory dictates that public goods and goods with large externalities can lead to market failures that can be ameliorated by taxes, subsidies, or regulation. Private philanthropy can play an important role in addressing these market failures, especially for smaller, less politically powerful groups (Weisbrod, 1975) whose preferences are not reflected in the outcomes of majority voting. Conditional on their ability to overcome free riding, marginalized groups, such as women and minorities, can use the nonprofit sector as a substitute for government-supplied public goods. We test whether race and/or gender affects charitable giving by American households as measured under commonly adopted survey methodologies.

This paper estimates the correlation between the generosity of parents and the generosity of their adult children using regression models of adult children’s charitable giving. New charitable giving data are collected in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and used to estimate the regression models. The regression models are estimated using a wide variety of techniques and specification tests, and the strength of the intergenerational giving correlations are compared with intergenerational correlations in income, wealth, and consumption expenditure from the same sample using the same set of controls. We find the religious giving of parents and children to be strongly correlated, as strongly correlated as are their income and wealth. The correlation in the secular giving (e.g., giving to the United Way, educational institutions, for poverty relief) of parents and children is smaller, similar in magnitude to the intergenerational correlation in consumption. Parents’ religious giving is positively associated with children’s secular giving, but in a more limited sense. Overall, the results are consistent with generosity emerging at least in part from the influence of parental charitable behavior. In contrast to intergenerational models in which parental generosity towards their children can undo government transfer policy (Ricardian equivalence), these results suggest that parental generosity towards charitable organizations might reinforce government policies, such as tax incentives aimed at encouraging voluntary transfers.