Who Cares? toward an Integrated Theory of Volunteer Work*

values of benevolence do not discriminate between help provided to strangers and help provided to kin and friends, or between organized help and casual help. We assume that people who define the good life as helping others will be more helpful. Given the wording of the question, we expect the relationship with helping will be stronger than the relationship with formal volunteering. We expect to find a difference in the impact of religion on volunteering and helping. Because formal volunteering is more a matter of choice than is helping, we expect religiosity to have a greater impact on volunteering than on helping. Our results should correspond with those of Wuthnow (1994), who finds that church attendance is positively related to volunteering but not to “helping a relative or friend live through a personal crisis” (p. 241). We assume that volunteering and helping are related. We agree with Smith (1994:255) that participation in one kind of culturally approved activity encourages participation in others. In this case, volunteering and helping should be positively related. Gallagher (1994) finds that “[t]otal hours spent helping friends is a significant predictor of both hours of volunteering overall and hours of charity work, while hours of volunteering is 7 More generally, “. . . women have been found to play a greater role both in maintaining kin networks and in providing help to those in the networks,” owing to “socialization related differences in nurturance and to differences in time availability” (Spitze and Logan 1992:293). This pattern may reflect women’s greater “stake” in the next generation because they are more likely than men to need help from someone other than a spouse in later years. Also, women may have more skills in this less formal area of helping. 8 Education should have less impact on helping because neither skills nor knowledge gained from schooling are necessarily of benefit. Income also should not be important. We say this despite the powerful argument that low-income families are more likely to exhibit helping behavior than are middle-income families because low-income families must depend on kin and friends for help (e.g., child care) that middle-class families can afford to buy (Soldo and Hill 1993:198). 702 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW a significant predictor of hours of help to friends” (p. 575). We model for reciprocal effects and assume they are positive. Because we specify a causal relation between forms of capital and volunteer work, we are concerned with the time order of behaviors. For instance, we predict that high levels of social capital lead to more volunteering. However, such a positive association could also be interpreted as showing that volunteering is a way to make friends and accumulate social capital. To deal with this problem, we use two waves of data. The volunteering and helping measures are taken in the second wave of data collection, whereas all other variables (except health status) are measured in the first wave. Because we include the first wave measures of volunteering and helping in the model, we are conducting conditional change analysis (Finkel 1995).