Youth Volunteering in Countries in the European Union

Abstract

The reasons why people volunteer their time and services are of great interest and they have been the subject of academic research. This article helps identify some of the underlying reasons for the marked differences in youth volunteering among member states of the European Union. Our objective is to describe the similarities and differences in countries’ youth volunteer rates on individual and national levels. To this end, we identified individual and contextual factors and compared volunteer activities. We used data from the European Values Survey (EVS) for that purpose. As a methodological strategy, we carried out Logit models to estimate individual probabilities of working as a volunteer. The main result shows that social capital variables are the most relevant when young people decide to participate in voluntary activities.