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Informal Volunteering and Immigrant Generations: Exploring Overlooked Dimensions in Immigrant Volunteering Research

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Abstract

Volunteering by immigrants provides dual a contribution: To civil society, immigrant volunteers can add an untapped human and social capital, social diversity and multiculturalism; to the immigrant, volunteering offers cultural, economic, and social benefits in their integration efforts. Yet, we need a more multidimensional probing of the term ‘immigrant volunteering’, because the multiplicity of migration generations requires questioning who is an ‘immigrant’, and formal volunteering does not capture the full array of unpaid work done by immigrants, suggesting the need to consider informal volunteering. By comparing formal and informal volunteering behavior of three immigrant groups (second-generation, generation 1.5, first-generation), we reflect on several distinctions and overlooked dimensions that might better explain whether and why immigrants withhold their volunteering. Using the 2014 wave of the German Survey on Volunteering, our findings indicate variation on formal and informal volunteering between the migration groups: differences are greater in formal volunteering, but smaller when we consider informal volunteering. Citizenship status and language proficiency also play a role. Implications of these findings are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Second generation individuals differ from native-born, defined as those who were born in the destination country to non-immigrant parents.

  2. Others combine second-generation and generation 1.5 into a single ‘second-generation’ category (Artero & Ambrosini, 2022).

  3. The GSV survey interviews started in German, but if interviewers noted difficulties, the respondents were offered the choice to conduct the interview in a different language. A native speaker of the chosen language would then call the respondent back to conduct the interview. Overall, 2800 respondents were offered to have the interview conducted in a different language, of which 712 were completed in a language other than German (Simonson et al., 2016). Only 2 native-born individuals and 9 second-generation immigrants took the survey in a language other than German; we removed those from the models.

  4. Despite the benefits of a fairly large, representative sample, relying on secondary, cross-sectional data limits our choice of variables and the opportunity to draw causal relations.

  5. Previous research has used either aggregated or disaggregated measures of informal volunteering (e.g., Wang et al., 2017). Our data indicates that 31% of respondents are engaged in childcare, 18% in care services, and 40% in assistance services. Given our modeling approach (bivariate probit), we use the aggregated measure.

  6. With the second-generation immigrant variable, all respondents that had one or two parents born in a country different from Germany categorized as second-generation immigrant. The survey specifically asked “Were both of your parents born in Germany” with response options (1) yes, both, (2) Yes, but only your mother, (3) yes, but only your father, (4) no, none of them (Schmiade et al., 2014).

  7. This is an aggregation of the 1997 version of the international standard classification of education which includes seven distinct categories: pre-primary education; primary education; lower secondary education; upper secondary education; post-secondary non-tertiary education; first stage of tertiary education; second stage of tertiary education. Categories 1–5 are coded 0, categories 6–7 are coded 1.

  8. These values are the results of a test for the difference in probability between those in each category compared to those in the reference category (when all other variables are held constant at their means).

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Acknowledgements

We are thankful for data access to the German Survey on Volunteering through the German Center for Gerontology (https://www.dza.de/en/).

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No funding was received for conducting this study.

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  1. Itay Greenspan and Marlene Walk have equally contributed to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Work & Social Welfare, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mt. Scopus, Jerusalem, Israel

    Itay Greenspan

  2. Institut für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

    Marlene Walk

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  1. Itay Greenspan
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Correspondence to Itay Greenspan.

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Greenspan, I., Walk, M. Informal Volunteering and Immigrant Generations: Exploring Overlooked Dimensions in Immigrant Volunteering Research. Voluntas 35, 23–35 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11266-023-00563-1

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