Why Get Involved? Reasons for Voluntary-Association Activity Among Americans and Canadians

Abstract

Using national representative sample survey data from the United States and Canada, the authors compare American and Canadian responses to a set of 14 possible reasons for being active in voluntary associations. They assess the 14 reasons individually and then conduct analyses in which the 14 measures are grouped into two composite scales: collective reasons and self-oriented motivations. The authors also consider theories for explaining how and why Americans and Canadians might differ in their motivations for volunteering. Analyses are conducted on seven background predictors: gender, race, religious affiliation, religious attendance, age, education, and socioeconomic status. Findings show that Americans are more likely than Canadians to mention altruistic rather than personal reasons for joining voluntary organizations, and Canadians are slightly more likely than Americans to emphasize personal reasons for their volunteer work, but this difference is not significant after controls. The implications of the findings for understanding voluntary activity in the two nations are discussed.

Social and Cultural Origins of Motivations to Volunteer

“…Findings by Hwang, Grabb, & Curtis (2005) and Ziemek (2006) suggest why this line of inquiry may be fruitful. Using the World Values Surveys of -1993, Hwang, Grabb, and Curtis (2005 compared MTV between Canada and the USA and found significant differences.…”

“…We thus aim to extend the initial arguments made by Hwang, Grabb, and Curtis (2005) and Ziemek (2006) using the social origins framework (Salamon & Anheier, 1998) -an approach yet to be taken. Following Salamon & Sokolowski (2001), we include three basic dimensions to explain differences in volunteering and MTV across the four nonprofit regimes: government social spending (high/low), nonprofit sector size (large/small), and dominant volunteering type (service/expressive).…”

“…Using the World Values Surveys of -1993, Hwang, Grabb, and Curtis (2005 compared MTV between Canada and the USA and found significant differences. Americans were more likely than Canadians to mention altruistic reasons for joining voluntary organizations, while Canadians were more likely to emphasize self-interested reasons for their volunteer work.…”

Attracting Volunteers in Highly Multicultural Societies: A Marketing Challenge

“…Hustinx et al (2010) applied this theory to investigate volunteer motivations across different countries and found that while volunteering is a personal decision and is therefore influenced by individual level factors it is also, to some degree, influenced by the broader social and political environment. Others have confirmed intercountry differences in volunteer motivations such as Hwang et al (2005) who found Canadians significantly more likely than Americans to cite altruistic reasons for volunteering, while Americans were more likely than Canadians to cite self-interested motivations. For volunteer organisations operating in multicultural societies these findings raise questions regarding the extent to which country-and culture-specific differences in volunteering behaviour remain when many different cultures settle within close proximity to each other to form highly multicultural communities.…”

Philanthropic Behaviour of Quebecers

“…A number of empirical articles have focused on different aspects of philanthropic behaviour in Canada, most adding regional variables to their regression equations (e.g., Andreoni, Payne, Smith, & Karp, 2011;Hwang, Grabb, & Curtis, 2005;Perks & Haan, 2010); some of them even conduct estimations by province or region separately (Apinunmahakul, Barham, & Devlin, 2009;Apinunmahakul & Devlin, 2004Hossain & Lamb, 2012Kitchen, 1992;Kitchen & Dalton, 1990). The goal of this article is to examine the charitable behaviour of people residing in Québec with the view to improving understanding of why their average gifts are consistently lower than those in other regions of Canada.…”