Paarlberg et al.: The Rural/Urban Volunteering Divide

In The Rural/Urban Volunteering Divide, authors Laurie E. Paarlberg (Philanthropy, Purdue), Rebecca Nesbit, Su Young Choi (both of Public Administration and Policy, Georgia), and Ryan Moss (Political Science, Georgia) seek to determine whether rural residents are more likely to volunteer than those living in urban places and why and how this inquiry may matter in today’s world.

Traditional folk wisdom and early social science findings suggested that rural people may be more likely to volunteer to help others, but this baseline assumption has been contradicted, or is at least unsupported by, some more recent empirical studies. Thus, in this work, the authors examine two questions: (1) are there differences between urban and rural residents’ propensity to volunteer, and (2) if yes, what accounts for those differences?

Using Census Bureau population survey data, the authors find that rural residents are more likely to report that they volunteer than their urban counterparts, but also note that these place-based differences seem to be decreasing over time.

The authors also complicate the rationale for why these differences occur. They assert that any rural volunteering advantage is based on a more complex mix of contextual community factors than simply a difference in who lives in rural places compared to urban places. In other words, the rural volunteering advantage is “not because rural places are inherently more civil, but because small places, by nature, have different levels of endowments to support volunteerism and activiate these community resources in different ways.”

Ultimately, The Rural/Urban Volunteering Divide complicates the conversation about the relative impact of various individual- and place-based factors in volunteering behavior and raises new issues for future research. For example, the authors note that, despite their current relative advantage, “volunteering rates are declining rapidly in rural places.” This work cannot explain the reasons for this decline. Given changing rural demographics and attendant declines in the provision of public support in some rural places, these changes in volunteering behavior may be even more consequential and thus important for further consideration in policy, practice, and research.