Paper 1. Measuring Volunteering: Comparative Estimates Among Developing, Transitional, and Developed Countries

• In Event: Perpectives on Volunteering: Voices from the South. Panel I

Abstract

Abstract:

Volunteering is a complex phenomenon that has often defied definition, let alone measurement. Undertaken in leisure time, it is nevertheless a form of work. Pursued for no monetary compensation, it nevertheless produces tangible and intangible benefits for both its beneficiaries and for the volunteers. Supposed to be undertaken as a matter of free will, it is often motivated by personal, cultural, religious, or other obligation. Finally, the perceived importance of volunteering lies not only in the economic value of its product but, also in the important social functions it performs in promoting social integration, civic participation, and the values of solidarity and altruism.

This paper presents information that can form the essential foundation on which other measures of the value of volunteering can most usefully be built. It begins by documenting the highly limited solid information that has long existed about volunteering around the world and the inconsistent and uneven quality of what limited data that do exist-- a product of the lack of an agreed conceptualization of this phenomenon or an approach to assessing it. To the extent that volunteering has been measured, the focus has been almost exclusively on volunteering through organizations, which introduces an important source of bias by disadvantaging regions in which voluntary organizations is limited but direct people-to-people volunteering is still abundant.

The paper then examines the recent advances in the measurement of volunteer work at the global level by the international statistical community achieved by the International Labour Organization in the 2011 publication of its Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work. Developed with the aid of an International Advisory Committee that included both statistical experts, nonprofit practitioners, and researchers from around the world, this Manual significantly broadened the focus of volunteer measurement beyond organizational volunteering to embrace direct (informal) volunteering and provided a set of standards that could produce comparable data for the first time on a global scale.

A number of countries have begun applying this Manual in their statistical work, producing the first truly comparable picture of the scope, composition, characteristics and value of both direct and organizational volunteering. The paper highlights the results of these early efforts, the new insights they have generated, and the broader estimates of the global scale of volunteering that they are enabling. Based on these and related data, we have been able to estimate levels of volunteering worldwide and compare them among developed, transitional, and developing countries. Ultimately, we find that when both formal and informal (direct) volunteering are taken into account, the differences in the rates of volunteering between developed and less developed countries reported in prior studies diminishes substantially.

As this foundation of knowledge about volunteering comes further on board, other scholars will be in a better position to explore both the demographics of volunteer involvement and the reasons for variations in that involvement, as well as to gauge more precisely the broader impact that volunteering is having both on the volunteers themselves and on those who benefit from their activity.


Keywords Volunteering, Civic engagement, Participation, National Measurement Standards

Key References:

Butcher, J. (2010). Ed. Mexican Solidarity: Citizen Participation and Volunteering. New York: Springer.
Butcher, J. (2010). Mexican Solidarity: Findings from a National Study. Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 21(2), 137-161. doi:1007/S11266-010-9127-7.
Einolf, C.J. (2011). Informal and Non-Organised Volunteerism (E3). Background paper prepared for the United Nations State of the World’s Volunteering Report.
International Labour Organization. 2011. Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work. http://ccss.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/01/ILO_Manual_FINAL_English_1.4.2012.pdf.
Salamon, L.M. (2010). Putting Civil Society on the Economic Map of the World. Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics, 81(2), 167-210. doi: 0.1111/j.1467-8292.2010.00409.x.
Salamon, L.M., Sokolowski, S.W., & Associates. (2004). Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Nonprofit Sector, Volume II. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press.

Authors

• Lester Salamon, Center for Civil Society Studies - IPS

• S. Wojciech Sokolowski, Johns Hopkins University

• Megan Haddock, Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies