Teenage Volunteers and Their Values

This article analyzes national survey data sponsored by the INDEPENDENT SECTOR and collected by the Gallup organization in 1991. The survey shows that values that favor charity and escheiv nraterial goals encourage volun-teering, and also that youthfroin higher social classes are ntore likely to vol-unteer than thosefrom lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Participation in religious activities and spiritual values are not related to the likelihood ofvol-unteering. Although thesefindings help us to understand who voIunteers, they also suggest strategies volunteer organizers ntay use to attruct volunteersfroni underrepresented groups. In 1991, nearly two-thirds of Americans twelve to seventeen years of age vol-unteered an average of 3.2 hours a week to some form of service activity (Hodgkinson and Weitzman; 1992). Through their volunteer activities, young people serve as a valuable source of labor and financial support for organiza-tions such as churches, schools, hospitals, and recreation programs. Further-more, these service activities have received considerable attention in the past ten years by educators (Conrad and Hedin, 1991). politicians, and journalists (Goss, 1993) as being an integral part of civic education necessary for citizens of a democracy Although an increasing amount of research on adult volunteers has devel-oped predictive models of volunteering that show the significance of social roles and statuses (Sundeen, 1988, 19901, the amount of empirical research focused on predicting volunteer behavior among teenagers is more limited (Conrad and Hedin, 1991). However, with the advent of national surveys of teenagers ' charitable behavior by the INDEPENDENT SECTOR (Hodgkinson and Weitzman, 1992), this gap should be filled. The increased interest in commu-nity service activities by youth has created a need for further theoretical devel-opment and empirical analysis in not only documenting which young peopl