James E. Curtis

Voluntary Association Membership in Fifteen Countries : a Comparative Analysis

We test the hypothesis, dating from the work of Weber and Tocqueville, that Americans are more likely to become involved in voluntary associations than people of other nations. Compared to previous work, we employ more recent data and consider more countries. We also examine several different measures of membership levels : all memberships versus working memberships as well as membership including and excluding church or union memberships. Cross-national differences are examined before and after controls for education, employment status, size of community, gender, marital status, and age. Results show Americans at or near the top on most measures of membership, although this ranking drops significantly when church membership is excluded and drops even further when only working memberships are examined. In these instances, people from several countries, including Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Norway, and Sweden, equal or surpass the membership levels of Americans, especially when controls are introduced. Some alternative intepretations of the cross-national differences in voluntary association activity are considered

Trends in Civic Association Activity in Four Democracies: The Special Case of Women in the United States

This study assesses whether civic association activity has declined in four Western democracies: Canada, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Influential accounts of decreasing civic engagement in the United States lead to the expectation of similar patterns in the other three nations. The authors test this hypothesis using data from time-use surveys of adult national samples for the mid-1960s to the late 1990s. One major finding is a clear decline in association activity in the United States, especially after 1975, but relative stability in the other three countries. Equally important are further results indicating that the American decline pertains only to women. Findings are sustained even after controlling for social background characteristics and four other activities (television watching, paid work, childcare, and physical activity). The analysis casts doubt on the theory that declining civic association activity in the United States reflects generational differences. Possible explanations for the reduced activity among American women, including lower levels of state support, are considered.

Why Get Involved? Reasons for Voluntary-Association Activity Among Americans and Canadians

Using national representative sample survey data from the United States and Canada, the authors compare American and Canadian responses to a set of 14 possible reasons for being active in voluntary associations. They assess the 14 reasons individually and then conduct analyses in which the 14 measures are grouped into two composite scales: collective reasons and self-oriented motivations. The authors also consider theories for explaining how and why Americans and Canadians might differ in their motivations for volunteering. Analyses are conducted on seven background predictors: gender, race, religious affiliation, religious attendance, age, education, and socioeconomic status. Findings show that Americans are more likely than Canadians to mention altruistic rather than personal reasons for joining voluntary organizations, and Canadians are slightly more likely than Americans to emphasize personal reasons for their volunteer work, but this difference is not significant after controls. The implications of the findings for understanding voluntary activity in the two nations are discussed.

The Social Sources of Political Knowledge

The study explored the sources of political knowledge using data from the 1984 Canadian National Election Study. Two dimensions of political knowledge were measured: factual knowledge, in which respondents were asked to name the 10 provincial premiers; and conceptual knowledge, in terms of respondents’ abilities to define and use the concepts of left and right. The authors tested four explanations of peoples levels of political knowledge; these dealt with education, political participation, media effects and region, with controls for income, residency in several provinces, age and sex. Education was significantly associated with both forms of knowledge, but especially with conceptual knowledge. Reading about politics in newspapers and magazines was strongly related to the two knowledge variables. The effects of reliance on television for political information, however, were much weaker. There were significant effects for region, with the patterns depending on the type of knowledge. The study concludes with some observations about the role of knowledge in political behaviour.

Gender and perceived pay entitlement : Testing for effects of experience with income

This article reports on 2 studies where variations on a research design from the literature on gender and perceived pay entitlement were used to test for effects of past pay experience and salience of the pay experience for the participants. In Study 1, level of previous income was not a predictor of self-payment behavior for women or men, and men allocated more pay to themselves than did women. In Study 2, women and men did not differ on perceived entitlement when the income and work experience were made salient, but they did in the nonsalient condition, as in Study 1. Also, past income and self-pay were positively correlated for women in the salient condition. Further, when the data from Study 1 and Study 2 from the same condition (past income nonsalient) were combined, those with the higher previous income level paid themselves more than others, among both men and women.

English Canadian-American Differences in Orientation toward Social Control and Individual Rights

Abstract This paper presents results from comparative secondary analyses of data from U.S. national surveys and a Canadian community survey which asked the same questions on individual rights and policies of social control Comparisons are made of responses on a set of twelve questions on six different issue areas. The findings bear on S. M. Lipsets thesis on Canadian-American value differences and Hagan and Leons test of this in analyses of the law. There is no evidence of more control-oriented responses by Canadians when compared with Americans, as might be expected from the thesis that Canadas values and laws are more control-oriented. Where there are differences they are more often in the opposite direction of more control-orientation by Americans. This is true for overall comparisons across the samples and for comparisons controlled for age and education. Alternative interpretations of the results are discussed.

Managerial Succession and Team Effectiveness: A Case Study of Japanese Professional Baseball

Data from major league professional baseball teams in Japan, for the period 1950 to 1975, were employed to test the generality of findings on managerial succession and team effectiveness from the North American case. The results show little support for the most common pattern from North American studies, that there is a negative relationship between managerial succession and team effectiveness. The strongest pattern in the results was that of a regression to the mean for team performance over time. The finding of no significant relationship between managerial succession and team effectiveness is discussed in terms of possible cross-cultural differences in performance criteria.

A Three-Generational Approach to Trends in Occupational Mobility

Secondary analyses of 1947 and 1963 data on three-generational occupational mobility are presented in order to provide additional perspective on the observation made in other studies that there has been a stable pattern of occupational status inheritance in the United States over the past several decades. Findings for males and females in the total samples show that the congruence between respondents and paternal grandfathers. It is found that when farm owners are excluded the degree of occupational status inheritance is considerably greater between the senior pair of generations. Implications of the findings are discussed.

Gender and perceived income entitlement among full-time workers : Analyses for Canadian National Samples, 1984 and 1994

In 2 studies, gender differences in perceived income entitlement through the use of survey data from 2 national samples of full-time workers interviewed in 1984 and 1994 were investigated. We examined whether, and how, views on income entitlement of women and men differ when they are asked about their earnings from real full-time jobs. As expected from the experimental literature, there are gender differences in perceived income entitlements before controls for work characteristics and social background characteristics for both samples and time periods; women felt deserving of less than men did. These differences persist even after multivariate controls for the effects of education, age, time in the career, and 3 characteristics of the type of job on which income entitlement views are based. However, significant gender differences in perceived income entitlement do not obtain with added controls for last years income in the 1984 data. They are much reduced, but still significant in the 1994 data. Both women and men often felt that they deserve somewhat more than they actually earned. In 1984, there was no difference in the proportions of women and men who felt they deserved more income than they earned, but in 1994 proportionally more women than men felt deserving of additional pay. The differences in results across the 2 studies may be due either to changes over time or to small differences in the procedures of the studies.

Sport and physical activity and subjective well being: national panel data for the U.S.

This study examines the relationship between participation in sport and physical activity and feelings of well being. Our previous cross-sectional survey research on this topic (McTeer and Curtis, 1990) is extended through the use of data collected at two points in time from the same respondents in a national sample of Americans. We include social involvement levels, along with other social background factors, as controls in the analyses. We expected to find a positive relationship between sport and physical activity and feelings of well being after controls. We expected this relationship to obtain for analyses for Time 1, for Time 2, and for the relationship of sport and physical activity at Time 1 and well being at Time 2. The analyses are conducted separately for males and females. At Time 1 and Time 2, the results sometimes show a modest positive relationship of sport and physical activity and well being for females and no such relationship for males. In the panel data, there is also some support for the hypothesis that involvement in sport and physical activity leads to feelings of well being for females, but none for the data for males. There were comparatively strong positive relationships of social involvement with well being for both males and females. Interpretations of the results are discussed.