Abstract
The authors investigate whether the population’s acceptance of reliance on more voluntary work in elderly care depends on how this need is framed. A survey experiment introduced four possible arguments. The analysis shows that framing influences the population’s attitudes. Arguments on increasing inequality and, to a certain extent, also financial sustainability make respondents less positive to assigning voluntary work an increased role, whereas the argument concerning supplementary services makes respondents more positive. The staff argument did not influence attitudes. The authors find strongest support for greater involvement of volunteers in elderly care among respondents with experience as volunteers in the welfare sector. An overall finding is that the population is divided on the issue of involving more unpaid voluntary work and that a narrow majority voiced a sceptical attitude.
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Notes
- 1.
Norwegian quotes are translated to English for the purpose of this book chapter.
- 2.
In the final sample, respondents with a low level of education, young respondents and respondents with an immigrant background are slightly under-represented compared with the population as a whole. As the sample was randomly drawn, this has no significance for our experiment. Only genuine arguments actually used in political debate in Norway were presented to the respondents. The survey experiment was conducted by the data collection company Kantar among a pre-recruited online panel. Kantar obtains the participants’ consent, and data is collected in accordance with the Data Protection Agency’s guidelines for the processing of personal data. See https://www.galluppanelet.no/Privacy for a more detailed description of privacy and Kantar’s processing of personal data.
- 3.
Survey experiments have been used in the fields of social policy and welfare research to identify people’s perception of what constitutes a fair distribution of the tax burden (Liebig & Mau, 2005), attitudes to different means of organising social welfare measures (Kangas et al., 2014), identifying perceptions of deserving poor (Will, 1993) and deserving of help in the area of health (Jensen & Petersen, 2017). This methodology has also been used in the area of pensions (Finseraas & Jakobsson, 2014; Scheubel et al., 2013).
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Christensen, D.A., Ervik, R., Lindén, T.S. (2021). The Attitude of the Population Towards the Involvement of Volunteers in Elderly Care: Results from a Survey Experiment in Norway. In: Ibsen, B. (eds) Voluntary and Public Sector Collaboration in Scandinavia . Palgrave Studies in Third Sector Research. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72315-6_6
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