The contribution of social resources to volunteering

Volunteer work calls for both individual and social resources. While they each make an independent contribution, they also interact with each other. Social capital is most productively used by those richly endowed with individual resources. Using two-wave panel data from the Americans' Changing Lives study, we estimated the effects of human capital (education), social class (occupational status, family income, and family assets), formal and informal social interaction, and network size and density on range of volunteer activities and hours spent volunteering. The main effects of human and social capital discovered in previous studies are replicated. Interaction terms reveal that social capital is a better predictor of both range and amount of volunteering among people with higher social status and more human capital.

Duke Scholars

Author John Wilson Sociology