Membership In Voluntary Associations Research Articles

Mastery and social position: factors in negotiating urban social resilience

The pragmatic view of urban resilience has re-framed long-lasting social issues as chronic social stresses that can be addressed by building strong social networks in urban environments. This practice, inspired by disaster management, is problematic because it presupposes a community whose members share the same fate. Conversely, social vulnerability emerges from the asymmetrical distribution of agency in the social order, so that a low social position jeopardises life chances. Hence, we argue that the social dimension in urban resilience should focus on the role of social positions and individuals’ agentic predispositions to control their life chances if faced with adversity (i.e., their Mastery). Using structural equation modelling and data from a 2018 public Dutch survey, we found that when mediated by Mastery, socioeconomic status drives the individual’s positive adaptation behaviour. In contrast, Interaction with Primary Networks, Neighbourhood Cohesion, and Membership in Voluntary Associations have an unsubstantial relationship to positive adaptation. These empirical results suggest that Mastery is crucial for people’s resilience in their daily life. In view of the recent shift towards negotiation in resilience thinking, we propose Mastery as the guiding factor for transforming arrangements that shape social positions.

CONCEPTUAL POSITIONS OF THE VALUE-CULTURAL APPROACH TO THE EXPLANATION OF THE POLITICAL ACTIVITY OF PERSONS

The article is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of political activity of persons. The purpose of the article is to study the positions of the value-cultural approach to explaining the factors of actualization and activation of the political activity of persons. The methods of analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, generalization and abstraction, historical, structural functionalism are used. Factors of modernization, material well-being, high education level, presence of social connections, political culture, national identities, membership in voluntary associations, and civil society are singled out. Established that the basis of political culture at the level of an individual is a psychological attitude to the role of one’s own “I” in the political sphere – a political attitude. It is emphasized that high political competence forces people to value democracy as a political system that provides an opportunity to realize their political attitudes; for them, democracy and a democratic political system is a value they willing to defend. Attention is drawn to the fact that a high level of education ensures the cultivation of active political attitudes, and access to resources (high income, participation in informal associations, the presence of a network of useful acquaintances) determines the success of political activity. The author comes to the conclusion that political activity is the implementing force of expressing of the value orientations of the person; its success, to the greatest extent, depends on social, intellectual, and financial capitals. The article has theoretical significance for research and interpretation of the phenomenon of political activity of persons. The achievements of the article can be applied to empirical research design. Further research may be aimed at considering other approaches.

Rural Parents' School Choices: Affective, Instrumental and Structural Influences

The paper discusses qualitative findings from an in-depth study of the school choices of 65 parents living in rural and remote areas of Tasmania and their views about the need for their children to move out of the area to pursue education at secondary and post-secondary level. A constructivist analysis of open-ended survey questions and focus group discussions formed part of a broader mixed-methods approach and probed the affective 'subtext' of instrumental survey responses. Findings contribute to our understanding of the interaction of affective, instrumental and structural factors influencing rural parents' educational decision-making in the neo-liberal policy context, especially with regard to decisions perceived by parents as 'risky' with respect to their own future employment and financial expectations. External threats to rural livelihoods, such as economic downturns and natural disasters create parents' feelings of anxiety about children's educational futures and are experienced differently by those living on farming properties or in small rural towns. Parents' perceptions of local and urban school availability, access and quality differ by locality and region. Educational outcomes reflect multidimensional structural, socio-economic and cultural constraints shaping school choice. Membership of voluntary associations, which provides supportive informational networks and develops shared social capital, appears to help parents to overcome socio-economic inequalities and improve their children's prospects of educational success. The interplay of social class, gender and place attachment is examined with reference to Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and disposition, as well as the processes by which parents try to transmit intergenerational advantage through educational choices.

Voluntary Association Participation and White Ethnic Diversity in Rural Iowa Communities

Membership in voluntary associations is of core importance to civil society. In this study, I build on the large literature that focuses on how community racial/ethnic diversity affects individuals’ joining of—and participation within—voluntary associations. The central focus is on White ethnicity or European ancestry, which I analyze using the 2004 Iowa Community Survey and 2000 U.S. Census data. I find that White ethnic diversity is associated with fewer overall memberships and less frequent participation, with differing effects for various large groupings of voluntary organizations. I close our study by discussing the implications of my findings for organizations and the broader community.

The Impact of Civic and Religious Social Capital on the Antisocial Attitudes of the Youth: A Multi-Level Cross-National Study

The main goal of this paper is to investigate whether some dimensions of civic and religious social capital are connected to antisocial attitudes of the youth. Based on the social capital theory and previous research, the author assumed that membership of voluntary associations as a dimension of civic social capital and attendance at religious services as a dimension of religious social capital, will be negatively correlated with antisocial attitudes of the youth. The integrated dataset of the last European Values Study and the World Values Survey waves were used as the sources of the research data. The dataset was comprised of 11,411 respondents who were younger than 25 years old from 79 countries. As hypothesized, at the individual level, attendance at religious services was negatively correlated with antisocial attitudes, whereas membership of voluntary associations was positively correlated with antisocial attitudes. At the country level, none of the hypothesized correlations were confirmed. A cross-level interaction between GDP and associational membership was found. The author explains the findings by evoking the special characteristics of religious social capital and its strength in building moral obligations and by suggesting possible differences in incentives for joining voluntary associations in the countries with different levels of economic wealth.

Social capital mediates the effect of socio‐economic status on prosocial practices: Evidence from the CGSS 2012 survey

AbstractAlthough the relationship between socio‐economic status (SES) and prosocial practices has been extensively studied, little is known about the role that social capital plays in this relationship. This study examines the mediating effect of different forms of social capital, including informal neighbourhood capital, membership in voluntary associations, and professional connection, on the relationship between SES and prosocial practices. A total of 3,300 urban samples and 2,170 rural samples from the Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) 2012 were selected to conduct two‐group structural equation modelling. Our results suggested that (a) all three forms of social capital mediated the effect of SES on donating, but only informal neighbourhood capital and membership mediated the effect of SES on volunteering, and (b) SES had a different relationship with social capital in urban China than in rural China. SES had a weak positive correlation with informal neighbourhood capital in rural areas but a negative one in urban areas. SES also had a stronger relationship with membership in voluntary associations in rural areas. Our analyses support the notion that higher SES promotes prosocial practices through social capital.

Time matters: civic engagement and the development of anti-immigrant attitudes among adolescents

A recurring claim in the literature is that civic engagement in voluntary associations is crucial for the formation of a variety of interpersonal attitudes, such as social trust, tolerance, and intolerance. In this article, we study the role of membership in voluntary associations and volunteer work in the development of anti-immigrant attitudes among adolescents. Using a four-wave longitudinal design with a target sample comprising approximately 2000 adolescents between the ages of 13 and 16 at the first measurement occasion, this study contributes to previous research by analysing the impact on anti-immigrant attitudes of different dimensions of membership in voluntary associations and volunteer work. The results showed that membership in voluntary associations and volunteer work over several years serve to decrease anti-immigrant attitudes among adolescents over time. In addition, volunteering over several years seems to have a somewhat stronger impact on anti-immigrant attitudes than do various aspects of membership in associations. Our study also shows that anti-immigrant attitudes become more firmly established with age and that membership in only certain types of voluntary associations relates to attitudes toward immigrants. In sum, this study contributes to previous research focusing on the role of civic engagement in the development of interpersonal attitudes.

Voluntary associations and hazard preparedness behaviour amongst Taiwanese individuals

ABSTRACT This study examined how Taiwanese individuals’ preparedness behaviours regarding natural hazards are linked to their social connections and to their direct/indirect exposure to previous natural hazards. Using 2013 Taiwan Social Change Survey data, this study investigated how the respondents’ membership in voluntary associations, damage experience caused by previous hazards, and perceived risk of potential hazards affect their adoption of hazard preparedness behaviours. The study distinguished three types of associations—civic, reward-based, and social/recreational—and three types of damage from natural hazards—property loss, psychological trauma, and injury—to determine whether they have different effects on the adoption of hazard preparedness behaviours. The results of this study indicate that the members of voluntary associations were more prepared for natural hazards than non-members; the members of civic and reward-based associations tended to take significantly more preparedness measures than non-members, whereas the members of social/recreational associations did not. In particular, the members of reward-based associations were likely to initiate their first preparation measures. Meanwhile, both damage experience and risk perception showed positive effects on the adoption of preparedness behaviours, but these effects were stronger for typhoons than for earthquakes.

Civic engagement in times of economic crisis: a cross-national comparative study of voluntary association membership

AbstractDo economic crises mobilize or depress civic engagement? This paper examines this question by analysing cross-national trends in voluntary association membership in the context of the global financial crisis. A mobilization hypothesis suggests that an economic crisis would increase membership in voluntary associations, as these associations provide citizens a channel for interest articulation and aggregation facilitating their response to the crisis. A retreat hypothesis, on the other hand, suggests that an economic crisis would depress voluntary association membership, as people have fewer resources to be involved in these associations at a time of crisis. To test these hypotheses, this paper examines data on voluntary association memberships from the World Values Survey in 14 democratic countries, fielded before and after the global financial crisis hit in 2008. The results support the retreat hypothesis. Following the crisis, there was a decline in voluntary association memberships overall and countries harder hit by the crisis were more likely to experience declines. There was no evidence of mobilization among those more vulnerable to the crisis. Rather, the profile of those engaged in voluntary associations was similar before and after the crisis, skewed towards those better off in society, including those with higher education levels, higher incomes, and in paid employment.

Bonding and bridging social capital and their associations with self‐evaluated community resilience: A comparative study of East Asia

AbstractThe purpose of this study is to test key social capital indicators in a disaster context by considering the bonding and bridging types of social capital. Using the East Asian Social Survey, this study chooses three behavioural/cognitive elements of social capital—social trust, voluntary association membership, and personal networks—and divides them into bonding and bridging social capital, in‐group and out‐group trust, homogeneous and heterogeneous membership, and strong and weak ties to test their effects on self‐evaluated community resilience to natural hazards. The results showed that social trust and personal networks had strong positive effects, but the effect of voluntary association membership was positive in societies with high rates of membership (Japan and South Korea) and negative in a society with a low rate of membership (Taiwan). Furthermore, while bonding social capital generally showed a stronger effect than bridging social capital in East Asia, a society with more frequent and intense disasters (Japan) showed a strong effect of heterogenous membership on self‐evaluated community resilience. This study connects two aspects of social capital studies—the elements and the types of social capital—and the findings imply that the relationship between social capital and community resilience may have some mediator variables.

In Social Capital We Trust?

It has been widely postulated in the literature that social capital is positively related to or is the same as trust. The present study presents three theoretical perspectives regarding how individual and organizational social capital may be related to network trust and generalized trust: the compositional element (Putnam), functional equivalence (Fukuyama), and mutual independence (Lin). To each of these perspectives we allocated distinct measures of individual and organizational network mechanisms considering their operational definition of social capital. Using nationally representative data sets from the United States and China, we developed a comparative research design through which the three perspectives were put into an empirical test. In conclusion, we found that the compositional element perspective is most prone to cross-national contingencies, whereas the mutual independence perspective is freer from such contextual influences. In particular, the positive association between number of membership in voluntary associations (organizational social capital) and generalized trust exists only in the United States, whereas individual social capital based on network diversity and resources is unrelated to generalized trust in neither country. Lastly, the functional equivalence perspective does not get empirical support from the data, particularly with regard to the proposed negative relationship between network closure and generalized trust. These findings challenge the assumptions concerning the positive association or equivalence between social capital and trust in the literature.

How Accurate Are Self-reports of Voluntary Association Memberships?

Questions on voluntary association memberships have been used extensively in social scientific research for decades. Researchers generally assume that these respondent self-reports are accurate, but their measurement has never been assessed. Respondent characteristics are known to influence the accuracy of other self-report variables such as self-reported health, voting, or test scores. In this article, we investigate whether measurement error occurs in self-reports of voluntary association memberships. We use the 2004 General Social Survey (GSS) questions on voluntary associations, which include a novel resource: the actual organization names listed by respondents. We find that this widely used voluntary association classification scheme contains significant amounts of measurement error overall, especially within certain categories. Using a multilevel logistic regression, we predict accuracy of response nested within respondents and interviewers. We find that certain respondent characteristics, including some used in research on voluntary associations, influence respondent accuracy. Inaccurate and/or incorrect measurement will affect the statistics and conclusions drawn from the data on voluntary associations.

Reaching a New Balance in Freedom of Association: The Goods Approach

Establishing a better balance in questions of discrimination by associations is an urgent task to realize a well-functioning, truly inclusive pluralist society. While associations continue to claim exceptions from anti-discrimination law, membership in voluntary private associations can provide access to goods that might considerably influence life chances. Restrictive membership policies may thus conflict with anti-discrimination efforts of the liberal democratic state. Upon critical examination, I find that neither the current U.S. Supreme Court approach that protects a group’s explicit message, nor the alternative approach that would shield all predominantly expressive groups, adequately protects the important liberty, equality, and democracy interests at stake. I therefore propose a goods approach that develops a more sophisticated conceptualization of associational goods by devising three parameters to operationalize the harm caused by exclusion: their materiality, availability, and valence. This avoids the stark dichotomy between extensive protection and intrusive regulation of associations by introducing the option of decoupling goods from membership, thereby offering a new logic for balance that allows all citizens a sufficient set of opportunities while not unduly restricting associational freedom of expression.

Social capital and self-rated health: Clarifying the role of trust

While research on social capital and health typically focuses on generalized trust (trust in abstract others), questions about the conceptualization and measurement of generalized trust remain, including whether trust should even be considered a part of social capital. We present a new approach to studying trust in the context of health and argue that consideration of the mechanisms through which social capital influences health highlights the central theoretical role of particularized trust (trust in known others). Furthermore, we argue that the effects of trust and social networks on health are dependent on one another. Analyzing data from Waves 5 and 6 of the World Values Survey (WVS), we find that, net of control variables, particularized trust is more strongly associated with self-rated health than is generalized trust. In addition, we find that the predicted effects of particularized and generalized trust on self-rated health are conditioned by membership in voluntary associations and vice versa.

The Gender of Joiners

Memberships in voluntary associations can provide access to valuable social resources. Generally focusing on high- and middle-income countries, research has demonstrated that to varying degrees in different societies, women have fewer memberships in voluntary associations than men. This study examines membership in voluntary associations globally and thereby the national characteristics that drive the gender disparity. The national characteristics we examine include development and inequality. We argue that two theories researchers have used to explain individual-level memberships—the resource perspective and homophily theory—also apply to contextual influences on joining associations. Using data from multiple waves of the World Values Survey, we employ multilevel models to analyze the relationship between national context and the individual vis-à-vis gender differences in memberships in voluntary associations. We find that macro-level resources such as the level of development, as well as macro-level heterogeneity in the form of economic inequality and indicators of gender inequality, significantly predict membership. However, macro-level heterogeneity explains gender gaps while macro-level resources do not. The findings of this study are applicable to countries spanning the full development spectrum and offer a new explanation of how social structures of inequality reproduce and create inequality at the individual level.

Human Empowerment and Trust in Strangers: The Multilevel Evidence

For three decades, scholars have focused on generalized interpersonal trust as the key component of social capital and there is a wide consensus that trust in strangers is the prime indicator of people’s general trust in others. However, little work with a specific focus on trust in strangers has been conducted in a comparative multilevel framework. The few existing studies are inconclusive because of deficiencies in both conceptualization and test strategy. Filling this gap, this article examines the determinants of trust in strangers on the broadest country base ever used in the study of trust, drawing on global cross-cultural evidence from the fifth and sixth rounds of the World Values Surveys—the first international surveys to include a direct question on trust in strangers. Reaching beyond conventional wisdom about the sources of generalized trust, we demonstrate that human empowerment at the country level is a powerful moderator of well-known individual-level determinants of trust. Specifically, in countries with lagging human empowerment, institutional trust, trust in known people, and material satisfaction are the only individual-level characteristics that enhance trust in strangers. We also detect an unexpected negative effect of education where human empowerment is lagging. In sharp contrast, in countries with advanced human empowerment, a much broader set of individual-level characteristics increases trust in strangers. This set includes ethnic tolerance, membership in voluntary associations, social movement activity, emancipative values, subjective well-being, age, and education. These insights inform a multilevel theory of trust, showing that human empowerment operates as a contextual activator of individual trust promoters.

Religion and politics: examining the impact of faith on political participation

ABSTRACTThis study examines the relationship between religion and political activity. It theorises religious influences on political activity and tests the impact of various religious factors on political participation in a large cross-national sample (1981–2014). This study integrates longitudinal data from the aggregated World Values Survey with country-level data in the hierarchical multilevel analysis that allows teasing out the individual-level religious influences, including membership in religious organisations, religiosity and self-identification with various religious denominations, and the country-level impacts. The temporal and spatial coverage of the data used in the study includes more than 65% of the world’s population. The seven types of political participation examined in the study include signing petitions, joining in boycotts, participating in demonstrations, taking part in unofficial strikes, occupying buildings and factories, voting and membership in political parties. We find that religion matters but not always in the expected ways. Religiosity, by itself, often serves as a deterrent rather than mobilising force for political engagement, regardless the denominational differences. It is the membership in religious organisations and other voluntary associations of a secular nature that make individuals more likely to engage in political activity.

Do Voluntary Associations Show Their Bright or Dark Side Under Adverse Societal Shocks? Evidence From 9/11

In this article, we reassess the relation between association membership and individuals’ feelings about immigrants, thereby focusing on possible shifts in this relation in the wake of negative societal shocks (i.e., the 9/11 terrorist attacks). That is, do such events tighten or loosen the connection between association membership and immigrant intolerance? Using repeated survey data from Flanders (Belgium), our results indicate that there is at best a weak overall connection between association membership and immigrant intolerance. The exception lies with members of socially embedded (or “connected”) associations, which tend to be significantly more tolerant toward immigrants. Interestingly, we find no significant change in the relationship between voluntary association membership and immigrant intolerance in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. This suggests that negative societal shocks have little direct impact on the membership-attitudes relation. The analysis contributes to discussions on the potential “bright” and “dark” sides of civic engagement.

Comparing the discussion networks and voluntary association memberships of immigrants and non-immigrants in U.S. suburban gateways

Using survey data from five Chicago (U.S.) suburbs, we build regression models comparing the social lives of immigrants and non-immigrants. We define immigration several ways (citizenship, legal status, immigrant generation, length of time in U.S., and race/ethnicity). Results indicate that the size, longevity and density of immigrants’ discussion networks are mostly comparable to those of non-immigrants, as are the number and longevity of their voluntary association memberships. Immigrants and non-immigrants differ little in geographic location of their network confidants and organizational memberships. However, there is less racial/ethnic variety in immigrants’ social lives, particularly if they are Latinx or not citizens.

The Joiners: Active Voluntary Association Membership in Twenty African Countries

To what extent do sub-Saharan Africans actively participate in voluntary groups, and how does development aid influence this involvement? This paper presents a baseline assessment of membership predictors for secular and religious voluntary groups across 20 sub-Saharan African countries. Using Afrobarometer survey data, I adopt an asset-based resources approach in which development aid is seen to mobilize local resources and increase incentives to join voluntary groups. The theory is tested with multilevel, cross-national logistic regression models, including both individual-level and country-level variables to predict active membership. At the individual level, I find that membership in voluntary groups is most likely among those who are well educated, rural-dwelling, male, black, and middle aged—a reflection of social advantage. However, poorer Africans are also likely to join such groups, as are those with a strong religious affinity. At the national level, development aid is positively tied to voluntary group membership, but democratic and economic progresses have little to no consequence on this behavior.