On Defining and Measuring Volunteering in the United States and Abroad

Even though volunteering has been a distinguishing feature of American society since its inception, scholars continue to struggle with how to accurately describe and measure it. Eleanor Brown’s The Scope of Volunteer Activity and Public Service and Helmut Anheier and Lester Salamon’s Volunteering in Cross-National Perspective: Initial Comparisons demonstrate that nonprofit scholars have yet to provide the conceptual rigor or collect the necessary data that the subject of volunteering warrants. Although seemingly an easy concept, popular usage and the demands of scholarly precision have made developing an all-purpose definition of volunteering nearly impossible. Even the use of the word “amateurs” in the title of this issue is misleading. “Amateurs,” at least as used in everyday conversation, refers to individuals who are not as accomplished or professional as another group. While this may be true of some volunteers, it is unlikely that volunteer firefighters, board members of nonprofit organizations, lawyers who engage in pro bono activities, or medical doctors who work for such groups as the Nobel Prize-winning Doctors Without Borders would describe themselves or should be viewed as amateurs. On the contrary, many of these volunteer groups are the best trained and most experienced at what they do in the entire world. The observations that follow are divided into three sections. The first section examines the conceptual difficulties in defining volunteering and the implications of excluding or including different notions of volunteering. The second section examines the limitations of the data that is currently available to measure the scope and breadth of volunteering. The last section examines what is known about who is asked to volunteer and the implications for institutions that rely on volunteers to carry out their activities.