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The Immediate Effects of Changes in Life Circumstances on Volunteering Decisions in the USA

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Abstract

This study tests how changes in social background (homeownership status and employment status) and changes in household structure (marital status, number of children, and volunteering behaviors of other household members) influence an individual’s volunteering decision. We use a complex dataset from the US Current Population Survey Volunteer Supplements from 2002 to 2015. We captured the short-term “shock” effect of the changes in life circumstances on the changes in volunteering status; different factors influence start and stop in volunteerism in different ways. A person is more likely to start volunteering when the person became unemployed, when other household members increased their volunteering time, or got married, within a one-year period. Meanwhile, a person who experiences changes in employment, homeownership, or marital status, or has an increase in the number of children is more likely to stop volunteering. Based on the findings, we provide recommendations for those who are interested in volunteer management strategies.

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Notes

  1. In order to identify individuals who participated in the survey twice, we used household ID, person’s line number, gender, race, and age in a matching algorithm. All variables had to remain the same with no differences, except differences in age between time 1 and time 2, which should be either 0 or 1 (Madrian and Lefgren 2000). Additionally, we excluded multi-family households and those who had more than one year of differences in educational attainment between time 1 and time 2.

  2. Although many national surveys such as the US Census now allow more categories in gender than binary, the CPS data, at least during the time period of our analysis, provided each person’s gender as binary. We follow the previous studies (Nesbit 2013; Quaranta 2016; Taniguchi 2006; Wang et al., 2017), which consider gender as a binary variable.

  3. We tested covariates in the models for robustness to confirm their contributions. We built the models using BIC tests to ensure satisfactory goodness of fit contributions. Additional robustness check results are included in Appendix C and D.

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Correspondence to Hyunrang Han.

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No, W., Han, H. & Swindell, D. The Immediate Effects of Changes in Life Circumstances on Volunteering Decisions in the USA. Voluntas 33, 795–806 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-021-00380-4

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