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Dr. Rebecca Nesbit, from the Department of Public Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia, and Dr. Laurie Paarlberg, from the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, are recipients of a 2017 National Service and Civic Engagement Competition Research grant from AmeriCorps. Their goal was to examine the determinants of rural and urban volunteering.

Public policy increasingly depends upon voluntary action to address local issues, yet local capacity for voluntary action differs significantly across the country. This project explores the place-based determinants (various factors unique to a specific location) of differences in volunteering behavior between rural and urban respondents by accessing the confidential Current Population Survey volunteering data, supplemented by existing administrative records and county-level census and demographic data. The study will analyze this unique dataset in a secure Census Bureau Research Data Center using a multi-level modeling approach with lagged community variables.

Analyzing the full population of CPS respondents across multiple years will enable researchers to understand how changing community dynamics affects volunteering and generalizes results to both rural and urban contexts. The preliminary findings indicate that rurality matters. Rural respondents are more likely to volunteer for secular organizations and volunteer more hours. Community characteristics are also important, although they matter more for the likelihood of volunteering than the hours volunteered. The effect of individual characteristics on volunteering vary across rural and urban communities. In particular, individual resources (e.g. education, employment) are more strongly related to volunteering in rural places than they are in urban places, suggesting that the value of personal resources is different depending on an individual’s community context.

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