Constructing a Philanthropy-scale: Social Responsibility and Philanthropy

Philanthropy expresses long-term commitments with public goods. Key motives for philanthropy concern stewardship and social responsibility for the well-being of society as a whole. These motives have rarely been studied. Instead, previous research on giving and volunteering has used measures of personal motives for prosocial behavior in interpersonal relations. Philanthropy however, often benefits unknown strangers or nonprofit organizations. We argue that feelings of civic duty and social responsibility, labeled ‘stewardship’ in the Christian tradition, are important motives for philanthropy that are more central to the definition of philanthropy and therefore deserve attention. In the present paper, we introduce such a “philanthropy-scale”. Using data from the first two waves of the “Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey” (2001 and 2003), we find that in spite of the moderate reliability of the scale (.55), the test-retest reliability over a two year period is also moderate (.43). Social responsibility has positive relations to other prosocial motives for philanthropy (high internal validity). Most importantly, social responsibility has predictive validity for philanthropic behavior (external validity). Our philanthropy scale is more strongly correlated with philanthropy than other attitude scales, measuring prosocial motives such as altruism, trust, or social value orientation.