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Volunteering for Nonprofits:
The Role of Religious Engagement
By Kirsten Grønbjerg and Brent Never. Paper presented at the Association for the Study of Religion. Chicago, August 14-16, 2002.
Abstract
Given
current U.S. efforts to strengthen volunteering and promote faith-based
provision of social services, it is appropriate to examine the underlying
dynamics of how religious engagement relates to other types of social
engagement, specifically volunteering. This paper, drawing on a telephone
interview survey of 526 Indiana residents, considers the effects that
religious preference and frequency of attending religious service have
on the extent to which people are engaged in their local communities
through volunteering. Using measures of demographic characteristics,
socio-economic status, and community attachment, we find that volunteering
is related to age, marital status, income, education, voter registration,
frequency of obtaining local news, and source of community news. The
multivariate analysis shows that the primary predictive factors for
volunteering are education, voter registration, religious preference,
and frequency of attending religious services. Notably, religious engagement
has an independent effect on volunteering apart from these other contributing
factors.
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