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Volunteering and the Dimensions of Religiosity: A Cross-National Analysis

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Review of Religious Research

Abstract

Religion and volunteerism are closely linked, but which aspects of religiosity matter most for volunteering? This article predicts volunteering with a multi-dimensional model of private and public religiosity using a sample of 9,464 respondents from 15 Western European countries. An interaction between private and public religiosity is also theorized and tested. Three dimensions of private religiosity (religious salience, prayer, and belief) are significant in predicting volunteering, and each has a significant interaction effect with public religiosity, measured by religious attendance. The influence of public and private religiosity on volunteering, and their interaction, differ by religious affiliation.

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Notes

  1. As discussed in greater detail below, we limit our analyses to Western Europe to maximize comparability across religious affiliations and attempt to guarantee a set of shared understandings of the dimensions of private religiosity such as prayer or belief.

  2. A notable exception is the Daily Spiritual Experience Scale. This 16-item scale of spirituality has demonstrated psychometric validity across several countries and languages (Underwood 2011).

  3. Prayer can certainly be practiced publically. Our measure of prayer, discussed below, is designed to capture private prayer.

  4. Another important, but distinct, aspect of religious belief is theological conservatism. Studies in the U.S. indicate important differences between theological conservatives and their less conservative counterparts in engagement with the wider community (Schwadel 2005; Finke et al. 2006; Scheitle and Adamczyk 2009; see also Beyerlein and Hipp 2006) and many scholars who have included a dimension of belief in studies of volunteering have considered denomination specific beliefs that would distinguish between theological conservatism and liberalism (Lam 2002; Van Tienen et al. 2011; Wilson and Janoski 1995). Unfortunately, our data do not include measures of theological conservatism to compare to the measures of conventional religious belief that we do have. Thus, we consider belief in a more general sense as a set of beliefs in the afterlife (God, heaven, hell, etc.), which might cause an individual to focus on otherworldly things. The focus on this type of belief has the advantage of better comparability across religious traditions. Further, theological conservatism may be more conflated with the network argument than our measures of conventional religious beliefs as research has shown that individuals in theologically exclusive congregations are more embedded in their own congregations (Scheitle and Adamczyk 2009).

  5. The key question of this work is uncovering what other aspects of religiosity might be responsible for the strong established relationship between religious attendance and pro-social behaviors such as volunteering. It finds that while a few beliefs, such as the importance of personal happiness and the importance of being a good person (over faith), influence prosocial behavior, they do not mitigate the effect of attendance. In contrast, religious social networks do help explain the effect of attendance (Lewis et al 2013; see also Becker and Dhingra 2001; Bekkers and Schuyt 2008). Further, attendance has generally stronger effects than belief in these models. A separate question, and one that we focus on here, is whether attendance and belief (as well as other dimensions of religiosity) interact in producing prosocial behavior, specifically volunteering.

  6. Following previous research, it is further important to acknowledge differences between secular volunteering and religious volunteering (e.g., Bekkers and Schuyt 2008; Rotolo and Wilson 2012), which we present in auxiliary analyses.

  7. The 15 West European countries available in this wave of the EVS are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Spain, Great Britain. The EVS conducted face-to-face interviews in all countries, using a standardized questionnaire. A common concern with such large, cross-national surveys is comparability of the data across countries, especially with regard to translation issues. In the EVS, interviewing agencies translated the English master questionnaire into the national language and bilingual comparability for each country is extensively documented in a series of reports available online (e.g., EVS GESIS 2012). Another common concern is the experience of the survey organizations contracted to conduct the interviews. For the 1999–2001 wave of the EVS, surveys in all countries except Greece were conducted by experienced professional survey organizations. The EVS does make use of a methodology group to oversee data quality. See Halman (2001) for more information on the European Values Survey methodology.

  8. Although with this question there is an inability to count volunteering for more than one organization within a single category, it remains the most consistently used question across research studies to assess volunteering and appears in many surveys such as the General Social Survey and the EVS.

  9. Path diagrams like Fig. 1 represent relations between observed (measured) and unobserved (latent) variables. Latent variables are enclosed in ovals, while observed variables are represented with boxes. Straight arrows indicate direction of influence. Measurement error is indicated by δs.

  10. When assessing the effects of abstract concepts such as religious salience in cross-national research, it is crucial to first establish measurement invariance. The essential issue is whether the factor loadings are the same across countries (metric invariance), which indicates that there are not cross-national differences in how respondents interpret the questions used to measure these concepts (Steenkamp and Baumgartner 1998). The good fit of this CFA model, which imposes equality in factor loadings across countries, supports metric invariance, as did a nested comparison between this model and an auxiliary confirmatory factor analysis that did not impose equality in the factor loadings. Indeed, the necessity of the consistent interpretation of the religiosity survey measures across countries is one important reason to focus on Western Europe only.

  11. Alternative measures of prayer, including subtracting frequency of religious attendance from frequency of prayer, and a dummy variable flagging individuals who pray more than they attend produce similar results.

  12. Given that the majority of adherents in Western Europe come from a Judeo-Christian tradition, there is a general common understanding of the meanings of “heaven” and “hell.” Our multiple group analysis suggests that interpretations of these questions are indeed similar across the 15 countries in our analysis.

  13. Correlations between our measures of public and private religiosity vary between .34 (prayer and Belief) and .66 (Religious Salience and Religious Attendance). The variance inflation factor (VIF) for those variables are all less than 3 and the tolerance statistic/VIF for all variables do not indicate high levels of multicollinearity.

  14. While some previous research distinguishes among mainline and evangelical Protestants in the U.S. (Beyerlein and Hipp 2006), it is not possible to make distinctions within Protestants in the EVS. The information on specific Protestant denominations in the EVS is not comprehensive enough to do so accurately.

  15. Wave 1 of the EVS, while not including a measure of volunteering, does include a measure of sociability (whether the respondent prefers to engage in leisure activities alone or with others). We examined the correlation between this measure of sociability and religious attendance and it was very small (−.08), suggesting that the association between religious attendance and volunteering is not spurious due to extraversion.

  16. Effect sizes are less-easily compared across continuous outcomes and dichotomous outcomes.

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Acknowledgments

We gratefully acknowledge support from the Science of Generosity (University of Notre Dame/Templeton Foundation). We thank Robert Woodberry and participants in the Science of Generosity Conference for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

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  1. Department of Sociology, The University of Texas at Austin, 305 E. 23rd St., A1700, Austin, TX, 78712-1086, USA

    Pamela Paxton & Nicholas E. Reith

  2. Department of Sociology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

    Jennifer L. Glanville

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Appendix

Appendix

Volunteering for Secular versus Religious Organizations

Auxiliary analyses, appearing in Table 4 in the appendix, break volunteering into volunteering for secular organizations and volunteering for religious organizations. Although not the main focus of this paper, previous work on religiosity and volunteering has stressed that effects may differ depending on whether the volunteering is done for religious or secular organizations (e.g., Bekkers and Schuyt 2008; Rotolo and Wilson 2012). In auxiliary analyses, we modeled the count of the number of different types of secular organizations for which the respondent volunteers separately from the count of religious organizations. Since there was only one religious category asked in the EVS, we model religious volunteering with a hierarchical logit, and the coefficients presented are the logit coefficients. Although there are differences throughout the table, e.g., in the effect of other religions and married, our focus is on the pattern of significant coefficients in the religiosity variables.Footnote 16 In terms of main effects, we find generally similar results across the two types of volunteering, with only minor differences. Attendance, salience, and prayer positively predict both kinds of volunteering, whereas belief is a negative predictor only for secular volunteering. Interestingly, attendance interacts with salience and belief for secular volunteering only, suggesting that, rather than channeling volunteering efforts toward religious contexts, attendance and individual religiosity enhance one another’s effects on volunteering that is more bridging.

Table 4 Modeling secular and religious volunteering across 15 European countries (N = 9,464)
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Paxton, P., Reith, N.E. & Glanville, J.L. Volunteering and the Dimensions of Religiosity: A Cross-National Analysis. Rev Relig Res 56, 597–625 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13644-014-0169-y

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