Riccardo Guidi, Ksenija Fonović, and Tania Cappadozzi: Accounting for the Varieties of Volunteering: New Global Statistical Standards Tested

There has been an active discussion with far-reaching implications taking place, especially in the last 15 years, about the measurement of volunteering at the national and international level, involving the research community, national statistical agencies, the United Nations, and volunteer-involving organizations. These groups were independently grappling with the motivations, methods, and implications of measuring volunteering when their internal discussions began to intersect with each other in the mid-2000s. When the debate was elevated to an international level, with major research and national policy implications, things really started to come to a head. This book tells that story more comprehensively than any other to date and is important for researchers, students, statisticians, volunteer leaders, and policy makers to understand the origins of the discussion and the future directions it could take. Fortunately, the book includes the perspectives of these communities and has chapters relevant to each.

At least at the national level, studies of volunteering initially focused on activities carried out through organizations, sometimes called “formal” or “organized” volunteering. A handful of governments attempted to capture this activity through national surveys, which were carried out absent of coordination with each other, each using their own definition and methods, which rendered the resulting data incomparable internationally in the few countries where national surveys were conducted. Volunteering was captured by many countries using time-use surveys, but these were difficult to interpret or generalize given the very short observation period (24 h) for an activity that is not typically carried out on a daily basis.

For researchers, the dearth of nuanced, textured, internationally comparable data limited their research capacities in several ways. Additional information was needed on volunteering to access the scale of the global nonprofit sector workforce, the value of in-kind donations of time to organizations, the connection volunteering had to national and international studies of trust, community development and resilience, participation, well-being, and philanthropy. Initial attempts to gather internationally comparable data were made primarily in the 1990s, through the Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project and through international surveys like the World Values Survey. Significant basic information was generated, which sparked further interest in the subject, but these surveys suffered from small sample sizes, an exclusive focus on organized volunteering, and at least in the case of the Hopkins project, no clear way to update the data on a regular basis. More robust and consistent data was needed.

The international statistical system came to this question in a different way. The international statistical infrastructure that generates basic economic and employment information in the production of GDP and other economic indicators at the national level had placeholders for the reporting of unpaid work but had not yet identified the mechanisms and methodologies for measuring it well. Unpaid work was of interest to the statistical community because the informal economy is such a significant portion of the economic production economy of many countries and is a major component of the non-market production of nonprofit institutions. Labor statisticians were also especially interested in the proportion of unpaid work carried out by women, particularly unpaid work carried out in the household. Identifying a way to capture the portion of unpaid work carried out in a volunteer capacity was seen as chipping away at this larger question.

The United Nations Volunteers Program integrates UN Volunteers into development programming and promotes the value and global recognition of volunteerism. In doing so, they interact and sometimes coordinate with, many national volunteering organizations in policy conversations. Better data on volunteering would help them to make the case for the value of volunteering and the need for supportive policy infrastructures that would improve enabling environments for volunteering. In the context of the development of the post-2015 agenda for sustainable development, later established as the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, the push to include recognition of the work of volunteers in the development agenda became increasingly important.

Accounting for the Varieties of Volunteering picks up the story where these parallel conversations converge in 2008. This year, the 2008 System of National Accounts is updated and more fully integrates the data gathering and reporting guidelines for non-profit institutions. This recognition added weight to the need to gather data robust, comparable, data on volunteering.

It is also in 2008 that the International Labour Organization hosts its 18th International Conference of Labour Statisticians, the once-every-five-year gathering of labor statistics professionals and stakeholders to discuss changes in labor statistics standards. When presented with a room document prepared by the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies proposing the development of an international standard definition and methodology for measuring volunteering, there is resounding endorsement of the task (full disclosure: I was the project manager at Johns Hopkins at the time and was deeply involved in the development and push to implement the standards from 2008 to 2016).

The United Nations Volunteers, looking ahead to the preparation of the first State of the World’s Volunteerism Report, agreed to support the work, and the Johns Hopkins Center in collaboration with the International Labour Organization pulled together a technical experts group and set to work to develop the ILO Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work, reflecting common core definition that included not just organized volunteering, but also the much more common direct (or informal) volunteering that takes place outside the context of an organization.

Published in 2011, the ILO Manual was launched during the fortuitously timed 2011 European Year of the Volunteer, and with funding from the Italian foundations of banking origin, Johns Hopkins launched a European Volunteer Measurement Project in collaboration with European partners, including SPES, one of the organizations featured in Accounting for the Varieties of Volunteering, to promote its implementation and train statistical agencies and researchers to implement the new standard. In 2013 the ILO’s 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians formally adopted volunteering as a form of unpaid work (ILO 2013, Resolution I) and encouraged its measurement and reporting along side the measurement of paid work. In doing so it did make one important change to the definition published in the 2011 ILO Manual; the boundary for volunteering was changed from the household to “related family members.”

Several countries tested the new standard, but officials from the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) went farther and deeper than any other country to date, and their approach represents the ideal standard for doing so. As described in Accounting for the Varieties of Volunteering, the measurement of volunteering in Italy was carried out in close partnership between the statistical officials at ISTAT, academics with experience in the nuances that come with measuring volunteering, and volunteering practitioners with the knowledge of how the findings would be of benefit to the primary target population, the volunteers themselves. The stars aligned here with some luck, ISTAT was in process of carrying out a census of nonprofit organizations at the time the proposal to measure volunteering was made, a project that came out of, in part, the relationship it had had with the Johns Hopkins team many years prior as part of the Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project.

Part I of Accounting for the Varieties of Volunteering is focused on the measurement piece, the debates surrounding the definition and methods for gathering information and making the case for why the domestic diversity of Italy offers the “ideal model for countries approaching first-time implementation volunteering statistical standards” (p. 7). The late Lester M. Salamon, former Director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civil Society Studies authors Chapter 2, in which he provides an overview of the ILO approach, situating it in the context of national accounting. In his usual fashion, he neatly identifies the key challenges in defining and measuring volunteering and offers tidy answers to each. He describes the survey platform options, the measurement instrument, and the steps needed to see it implemented in every country in the world. Sure, it will be a challenge, and the ILO Manual isn’t perfect, but the course has been set and all that is needed is to start moving. We feel optimistic.

Not so fast, because the authors of Chapter 3 remind us of the many obstacles in the path to measurement, chief of which are the regional and local conceptualizations of volunteering, which are embedded in the local context, championed by different actors, and influenced by different key players. Variations in what is considered “free will” and “unpaid” differ, as do boundaries between volunteering and advocacy, expressions of faith, and mutual aid and reciprocity. Volunteering is also not static in form, but is changing in motivation, form, and type as volunteers seek more individualized preferences for engagement, that are becoming shorter in duration and level of commitment, and include new venues with the expansion of social businesses, corporate volunteering programs, educational and occupational volunteering requirements, national volunteering programs, and online engagement. The perspectives on the international standard from Anglo-Saxon countries, Continental Europe, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia leaves readers feeling a bit uneasy, like the whole project might be in peril. Given the varieties of conceptualizations and manifestations of volunteering, it begins to feel unclear that an international standard is going to be able to capture the activity in a meaningful way that will reveal local variations of volunteer work even though the chapter’s conclusion is that it is on the whole “well designed to develop cross-national comparisons without trivializing local varieties and current challenges of volunteering.”

Chapter 4 throws cold water on the academic hand-wringing with a practical chapter by Vladimir Ganta, a senior labor statistician at the International Labour Organization. Anyone seriously considering measurement at the national level should consider this chapter mandatory reading. In 2017, in partnership with the United Nations Volunteers Program, the ILO carried out a review of national measurement practices and tested many features of the ILO Manual approach. As a result, this chapter offers answers to many of the concerns presented in the earlier chapters, justifies suggested approaches with data, and provides clear explanations for what is known and what still needs to be researched. It turns out that we need not fear too much the concern that people will report doing work against their will, for example, as none of the respondents in the test case did. Respondents in the test cases were also generally clear that volunteering should not include significant remuneration, despite fears to the contrary. There was also significant worry that the international standard does not clarify what constitutes “family” and leaves it up to respondents to decide who their family members are; “It may seem that such an approach may lead to significant data comparability issues” (p. 88). But we are relieved to hear that in practice, “the impact of differences in concepts on estimates seems to be less significant.” Chapter 4 also offers an important section with recommendations for questionnaire design, survey platform, wording, reference period, and data collection period. The chapter concludes with important questions yet to be researched, though subsequent testing published by the ILO does answer some of these questions, including the need to measure time spent preparing donations and adopting a beneficiary-focused approach, rather than an activities-focused approach, to the survey module (ILO 2018).

Part I concludes with Chapter 5, which describes how the Italians interpreted and implemented the standards. Written by ISTAT statisticians, this chapter describes the decisions that were made regarding platform, classifications adopted, the partnerships with stakeholders, and its context with the development of a satellite account on nonprofit institutions. Non-statisticians reading this chapter will have the opportunity to gain insight into the strategic thinking and planning that goes into national surveys and the true depth of knowledge and care that national statistics officials bring to the task. The consideration given to the choice of a social survey instead of a labour force survey, and how ISTAT addresses the question of the household versus family boundary is instrumental.

Parts II and III consist of nine chapters that consider the resulting data in the Italian case. Part II advances theoretical considerations of volunteering and Part III advances research on the antecedents and impacts of volunteering. Given the frequency of the mention of “Italy” in the titles of these chapters, non-Italian readers might discount these sections thinking they represent mere case studies. That would be a mistake, keep reading. Chapter 6 offers the Italian case as the perfect testing ground for an expansion of the social embeddedness theory that the new data from the implementation of the new international standard makes possible. Italy is a complex country, and diving deeper into the data, down further than the national and regional level comparison have previously allowed, provide new insights into the heterogeneity of volunteering with lessons for other complex countries. National and regional comparisons alone have been leading us astray, as it turns out. The story is more complicated.

Social embeddedness is not just a question of the data at the country or regional level, it is “multi-scaler” according to these authors. New data allow the social embeddedness hypothesis to be “re-scaled” (p. 131). The complex ecology of volunteering includes political, cultural, economic, demographic, and other factors. Chapter 7 is perhaps my favorite; I appreciate the clever profiles the authors have given to main volunteer groups that emerge from the resulting data that emerge from testing the new hypothesis in Italy. In the case of organized volunteers, we learn about the attributes of the Committed Caregivers, Religious Educators, New Recruits, Investors in Culture, Sportsmen, Blood Donors, and Leaders. In the case of direct, or informal, volunteers, we learn about the attributes of Those who…Lend a Helping Hand, Those Ladies Which …One Cannot Do Without, Those Who…Choose To Do It On Their Own, and Those Who…To Donate Go Straight To the Hospital (apparently blood donation is a very common form of volunteering in Italy, both in its organized and direct forms). These volunteer profiles combine the field of activity, demographics, motivations, employment status, and other demographic details that are often reported separately in other studies and provide us with a much more useful and actionable picture of volunteering.

The remaining Chapters 8–14 provide deep dives into what the data reveal on the relationship between volunteering and employment, motivations, trust, political engagement and participation, and well-being. These are very interesting to read and new insights are provided in each. For example, in the case of employment, we come to understand in Chapter 8 that “the application of the official classification of occupations to volunteer occupations, makes it possible to describe the profiles of volunteer occupations” (p.211) and “that it is possible to study volunteering in a way analogous to how the labour market is studied in classic economic literature” (p. 214). I was struck especially by the following text, “As a matter of fact, volunteer work is done along side paid work and sometimes replaces, supplements, and even innovates it, especially in areas not covered by the job market. Therefore, it appears legitimate to borrow the data gathered from the classification of occupations to shed light on the parallel universe of volunteering; it is a universe that is still unexplored but called on to act in the same field and perform the same duties, although under different conditions. This approach, however, does not account for the human commitment and values that characterize volunteer activities. Comparing paid workers to volunteers means recognizing the dignity of volunteer work” (p. 211, my italics).

The data presented in Accounting for the Varieties of Volunteering moves the discussion of volunteering forward in presenting significantly more nuanced discussions of its measurement at the country level than previously seen to date. Embedded within the results are more questions to be answered, providing researchers with a long list of further puzzles to consider. It benefits from its multi-author perspective, allowing readers from a variety of backgrounds to pick up any chapter out of order. Read from cover to cover the result can sometimes feel repetitive, and not every chapter will appeal to all readers. But no matter the chapter, they key points come through: detailed cross-national comparisons of volunteering allow us to “see” and “understand” the differences between societies, to recognize that volunteering is not homogenous but is widely varied and is deeply embedded and connected to local traditions and is more complex than we have traditionally considered. Volunteering is part of the texture of communities, is not simple, has serious implications for well-being, trust, participation, and employment, and should be treated this way. Generating the required information is now possible, and the experience and example of the Italian case that carried out the work in partnership between statistical office, researchers, and practitioners, offers an ideal model for other countries to follow.

The conversation about the measurement of volunteering and the associated international standards for doing so will and should continue. As more research is generated, international recommendations will evolve. Since the publication of this book, the ILO has produced a Volunteer Work Measurement Guide (ILO 2021) that updates the original 2011 ILO Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work with new guidance based on the latest research, which will impact current measurement approaches. They have also produced an online training module for statisticians and comprehensive set of tools for the measurement of volunteering by national statistical offices. The measurement of volunteering is now fully embedded in the international statistical standards. What is done with it will be up the national statistical, research, and practitioner communities. Accounting for the Varieties of Volunteering paves the way.