Despite an abundance of survey data on charitable giving, researchers have not analysed these data asking the kinds of theoretical questions and employing the kinds of multivariate statistical techniques that would advance our understanding of the social processes leading to charitable behaviour. This article reports the authors' first findings from their continuing efforts to develop and test such a multivariate causal model of the social, demographic, economic and motivational determinants of individual charitable giving. The first section outlines our ident~cation theory of charitable giving. In the second section we discuss the data and how we operationalise our variables. The third section examines whether there is broad quantitative support for major tenets of the model developed if applied at the household level. In the fourth section we enquire about which factors are most strongly related to giving behaviour. We conclude with a discussion about the centrality of communities of participation for inducing charitable giving and about the practical implications for fundraising.Over the past ten years, a series of important national surveys in the US has been completed concerning the philanthropic behaviour of individuals (for example see Hodgkinson et al., 1992a,b), of their religious congregations (Hodgkinson et al., 1988), and of philanthropy and wealth (based on the 1998 Survey of Consumer Finances; Schervish and Havens, 1995). Despite this abundance of data, few researchers have analysed these surveys asking the kinds of theoretical questions and employing the kinds of multivariate statistical techniques that would advance our understanding of the social processes leading to charitable giving. This article reports the authors' efforts to develop and test such a multivariate causal model of the social, demographic,

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

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This article extends earlier methodological tests of giving and volunteering in Indiana to a large (N = 4,200) cross-sectional sample collected in the United States in the fall of 2001. The authors find that the results are consistent with those found in the earlier analyses, namely, that longer, more detailed prompts led respondents to recall giving and volunteering at higher incidence rates (proportion donating at all or volunteering at all) and at higher levels (dollars given or hours volunteered) than when compared to survey methodologies with fewer prompts.