Paul G. Schervish

A Methodological Comparison of Giving Surveys: Indiana as a Test Case

Every 4 years, the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University conducts a telephone survey (called Indiana Gives) of the giving and volunteering behaviors of Indiana citizens. In preparing to conduct Indiana Gives for 2000, a larger methodological question was asked: How much does survey methodology matter in generating accurate measures of giving and volunteering? In this most recent wave of the Indiana survey, conducted in October and November 2000, eight groups of approximately 100 randomly selected Indiana residents were asked to complete one of eight surveys related to giving and volunteering. It was found that the longer the module and the more detailed its prompts, the more likely a household was to recall making any charitable contribution and the higher the average level of its giving. These differences persisted even after controlling for differences in age, educational attainment, income, household status, race, and gender.

Methodology Is Destiny: The Effect of Survey Prompts on Reported Levels of Giving and Volunteering

This article extends earlier methodological tests of giving and volunteering in Indiana to a large (N = 4,200) cross-sectional sample collected in the United States in the fall of 2001. The authors find that the results are consistent with those found in the earlier analyses, namely, that longer, more detailed prompts led respondents to recall giving and volunteering at higher incidence rates (proportion donating at all or volunteering at all) and at higher levels (dollars given or hours volunteered) than when compared to survey methodologies with fewer prompts.

The Boston Area Diary Study and the Moral Citizenship of Care

This paper describes the theoretical foundations, empirical findings, and practical and philosophical implications of the Boston Area Diary Study (BADS), a study of the caring behavior of 44 participants over one calendar year. In particular, the paper presents an identification theory of care and discusses how it shaped the conceptualization, collection, and analysis of the data in a year-long diary study of daily voluntary assistance. The findings from the BADS (1) theoretically confirm the identification theory of care; (2) methodologically capture how individuals perceive and carry out caring behavior as a unity; and (3rpar; empirically document the existence of a moral citizenship in America that is substantially more vigorous than is implied by the usual indicators of civic and political citizenship.

Wealth and the Commonwealth: New Findings on Wherewithal and Philanthropy

Drawing in large part on the 1995 Survey of Consumer Finances, the authors describe the pattern of charitable giving by families at the upper reaches of income and wealth, as well as across the income spectrum. The overriding empirical motif is that the distribution of charitable giving is more highly skewed toward the upper end of the financial spectrum than previously documented, and that there appears to be a trend toward becoming evenmoreso.The over riding theoretical motifis that income and wealth are so thoroughly imbricated, especially at the upper end of the financial spectrum, that the analyses of the determinants of charitable giving need to shift from their current focus on the dynamics of income to a complementary focus on the dynamics of wealth.

USING ADJUSTED CROSSTABULATIONS TO INTERPRET LOG-LINEAR RELATIONSHIPS*

Log-linear analysis was developed as a more powerful technique for the analysis of multivariate tables of categorical variables. It was specifically designed to deal with some of the problems that plagued users of crosstabulations. of the major drawbacks to the traditional crosstabulation approach is the difficulty of controlling for the effects of more than a single other variable. This is often due to small sample sizes within cells of a crosstabulation entailing further control variables. In addition, since there is no direct test of the significance of the effect of a single independent variable, it is difficult to interpret the import of a series of crosstabulations of two variables within the categories of other control variables. Instead, there are as many test statistics as there are combined categories of the control variables. Thus, it is often unclear whether an effect is produced by an independent variable or through its interaction with control variables. Goodman (1970, 1972a, b) presented the first comprehensive treatment of log-linear analysis as a response to the problems of crosstabular analysis. About the same time, logistic analysis was developed as an alternative to crosstabular analysis for the case where the dependent variable is categorical and the independent variables are interval (Bishop et al., 1975; Fienberg, 1980; Nerlove and Press, 1973).1 Log-linear analysis, developed for the situation where all of the variables are categorical, overcame most of the problems of crosstabular analysis. Log-linear analysis provides better and more appropriate statistical tests. It provides a global test for each independent variable rather than a series of tests as was the case for crosstabular analysis. In addition, the results allow for a test of main effects separate from interaction effects. Moreover, log-linear surpasses crosstabulation by simultaneously estimating the effects of multiple variables, much in the same way that multiple regression is an advance over bivariate correlation. But in the process of moving from the simplicity of a crosstabular analysis to the sophistication of a log-linear analysis something was given up. In contrast to crosstabulation, log-linear analysis suffers from a lack of intuitive interpretability of the results. By an appropriate percentaging of the table by rows or columns, crosstabulations provided a straightforward estimate of how the distribution of the dependent variable changed across levels of the independent variables. On the other hand, researchers often find it difficult to interpret log-linear parameters and to communicate this interpretation intelligibly to readers who are

Do the Poor Pay More: Is the U-Shaped Curve Correct?

We first show where the U-shaped curve of the relationship between income and charitable giving, which is often construed as evidence that the poor pay more than do the wealthy, comes from. We then recalculate the relationship between income and giving, showing why the data do not support the contention that the poor contribute a greater percentage of their income to philanthropy.

The Methods and Metrics of the Boston Area Diary Study

The authors discuss the conceptual framework, methods, and findings of the Boston Area Diary Study (BADS) to provide insights into the problems and prospects of survey research on philanthropy. First, the conceptual foundations and the operationalization of the variables are discussed. Next, the research design and methodology are described, and the findings are briefly summarized. Next, two validity measures are presented: a comparison of the BADS results with those subsequently obtained by The Gallup Organization from interviews with the same participants and a study of possible Hawthorne effects produced by repeated interviewing. Next, some specific recommendations are made for the operationalization and measurement of giving and volunteering and for improvements to field procedures. In the conclusion, the authors reflect on the implications of careful research methodology for an adequate assessment of the range and level of care in society.

The moral biography of wealth : Philosophical reflections on the foundation of philanthropy

Moral biography refers to the way all individuals conscientiously combine two elements in daily life: personal capacity and moral compass. Exploring the moral biography of wealth highlights the philosophical foundations of major gifts by major donors. First, the author provides several examples to elucidate his definition of moral biography. Second, he elaborates the elements of a moral biography. Third, he describes the characteristics that make ones moral biography a spiritual or religious biography. Fourth, he discusses the distinctive characteristics of a moral biography of wealth. Fifth, he suggests that implementing a process of discernment will enable development professionals to work more productively with donors. The author concludes by placing the notion of a moral biography of wealth in historical context and suggests how advancement professionals can deepen their own moral biography by working to deepen the moral biography of their donors.

Variations on a Theme: More Uses of Odds Ratios to Interpret Log-Linear Parameters

This article presents an expository discussion of the use of odds, odds ratios, and functions of odds ratios as an aid to the interpretation of log-linear parameters. While there have been some previous presentations on the use of odds ratios, this method has never been fully and systematically developed for complex situations, nor have the potential problems of interpretation using odds ratios been discussed. The presentation in this article more fully elaborates the possible modes of drawing contrasts with odds ratios using any of the three common parameterizations of a log-linear model (ANOVA-like, regression-like, and logit). The sampling distribution and the calculation of standard errors for odds ratios are also discussed as are some cautions on the interpretation of odds ratios. A data analysis of unemployment using polytomous variables illustrates the application and interpretation of the odds-ratio approach.

Explaining the curve in the U-shaped curve

In a previous paper we have demonstrated that for the total population of households, including non-givers, lower income households participate less and donate smaller average percentages of their household incomes than do higher income households. In this paper we inquire about the relative generosity of that sub-population of households that actually donate to charitable causes. We base our analysis on data collected in the 1990 national survey of Giving and Volunteering in the United States conducted by the Gallup Organization for Independent Sector. In the first section we review the factors that differentiate the upward sloping curve describing the population of all households and the U-shaped curve describing the sub-population of contributing households. In the second section we demonstrate that a substantial proportion of the curvature in the U-shaped relationship operates through giving to religion. In the third section we show that giving by the 7 per cent of high givers increases the curvature while the giving by the 93 per cent of normal givers attenuates the curvature. In the fourth section we combine the previous two analyses by looking at the patterns of religious and non-religious giving for both normal and high givers. We conclude that income is not a reliable indicator of who is generous or selfish in regard to philanthropic giving.