The Informal Voluntary Association Landscape

• In Event: 530 - Regular Session. Voluntary and Non-Profit Organizations

Abstract

Sociologists have long been attentive to participation in associational life, and have recently grown concerned over its alleged decline. Yet most of this attention has been geared toward measuring participation in formal voluntary associations. To date scholars have not had a way to assess informal groups on any large scale. Luckily, a new source of data on informal voluntary associations is now available -- Meetup.com. In brief, Meetup.com is a website designed to facilitate in-person associating by providing a platform for individuals to form and join in-person voluntary associations. In this paper, we use data downloaded from Meetup.com to map the landscape of member-generated, bottom-up, informal voluntary associations and compare it to the voluntary association landscape as traditionally measured through the General Social Survey (GSS). We assess how associations generated from the “bottom up” compare to traditional “top down” formal associations and demonstrate that the types of informal groups that Meetup users create are quite different from those measured in our national surveys. Our findings further indicate that current GSS questions are inadequate for -- though not incapable of -- measuring Americans’ informal group memberships.

Authors

• Pamela M. Paxton, University of Texas-Austin

• Robyn Alexandra Keith, University of Texas-Austin