Volunteering, During and After the Pandemic

I got interested for an admittedly geeky reason. A colleague discovered that the act of volunteering was predictive of agreeing to participating in surveys. The social psychological basis of this seemed, in retrospect, to be a simple transference from helping others by giving one’s time or resources, on one hand, to giving one’s time to help a stranger who is asking for information, on the other. There is also probably a precursor cognition, one of trust assessment when encountering a stranger, that is built into the decisions. So, since that research finding that volunteering is linked to survey participation, I’ve been tracking rates of volunteering in the US.

Every two years, Americorps sponsors a supplement to the Bureau of Labor Statistics/Census Bureau household unemployment survey, which asks adult respondents about volunteering and related behaviors. For example, it asks questions about giving time for any organization or association in the past year, about contributions greater than $25 to a charity, school, or religious organization; and about informal helping for a neighbor or friend. While response rates to this household survey are falling over time, about 70% of the households respond to the current survey.

The results of the 2023 survey were recently released with comparisons to the 2017, 2019, and 2021 editions. Roughly half of adults report charitable giving, roughly a quarter, some formal volunteering; and roughly half, informal helping of neighbors and friends.

But there are some interesting changes over time. First, many activities of helping were lower in the 2021 reports than in the other years. One suspects that the pandemic, with the radically reduced physical interaction among people, affected some volunteering behavior. This is clearly true of formal volunteering but less true of informal helping of neighbors and friends. Similarly, it makes sense that charitable giving was less impacted by the pandemic relative to volunteering.

Second, drilling down into the bounce back of formal volunteering between 2021 and 2023 reveals some distinct patterns. Among generation groups, millennials (aged between 27 and 42 in 2023) display the highest jumps in volunteering and informal helping between 2021 and 2023. This is a curious contrast because the millennials don’t seem to show distinctive jumps in other giving behaviors (e.g., charitable giving). This IS the generation that was dealing with closed schools for children and care for shut-in elderly parents. It could be discretionary time for other helping activities was limited during the pandemic but reappeared by 2023.

To return to my geekiness, the response rates of the household unemployment rate are falling over time. Falling response rates would portend higher volunteering rates among the respondents, so we need to be careful. Post survey adjustments attempt to correct for this bias, but we cannot have assurance of their efficacy. On the other hand, by the way, the response rates have been falling for some time and there is no discernable trend in increased volunteering estimates.

So, in short, there’s some reason to take the findings seriously. Despite our daily discussions about a society so fractured by disagreement that we have lost empathy for others, there is little support for that. As a nation we’re not deteriorating in tendencies to help one another; in fact, there’s evidence that such activity is showing a post-pandemic rebound.