Abstract
Informal volunteering is seen as an important indicator of social relations and community life. We therefore investigate the impact of various socialization practices on informal volunteering, being small helping behaviours outside of organizations for people outside the household. From theoretical notions on socialization, we hypothesize that experiencing extensive prosocial socialization practices promotes informal volunteering. We examine socialization processes of both modelling and encouragement and consider two socializing agents: parents and partners. We test our expectations employing the sixth wave of the Family Survey Dutch Population (N = 2464) that included unique measures on socialization as well as informal volunteering and holds important control variables. Our results indicated that parental modelling, partner modelling and partner encouragement were all positively related to informal volunteering, but that parental encouragement was not significantly related to informal volunteering. Our paper, thus, underscores that socialization practices are relevant in nurturing social relations and community life.
Highlights
This study examines the role of socialization in explaining informal volunteering
We examined the role of socialization practices on informal expressions of volunteering
We tested our expectations with unique recent data from the sixth wave of the Family Survey Dutch Population (FSDP) (2017–2018) and extensively controlled for confounding factors to ensure that the reported effects of socialization practices may not be assigned to confounding factors
Summary
This study examines the role of socialization in explaining informal volunteering. Informal volunteering is here defined as helping behaviours for people outside the household, such as friends, neighbours and acquaintances, that do not involve any organizations or institutions (Einolf et al 2016; Li and Ferraro 2005; Wilson and Musick 1997). We test our expectations employing the sixth wave of the Family Survey Dutch Population (N = 2464) that included unique measures on socialization as well as informal volunteering and holds important control variables. We will answer the following research question: To what extent do modelling and encouragement by parents and the partner promote informal volunteering?
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