Lindsey ESRC SDA Continuity and Change in Volunteering

Much emphasis is being placed on the role of the volunteer in British society. The Coalition government's policies envisage that more needs can be met through community initiative, relying on voluntary effort. The Government's 'Big Society' policies give expression to this idea; the Big Society can be thought of as a framework of initiatives and legislation, such as the 2011 Localism Act, that will give neighbourhood groups new rights and powers to act on behalf of their community. The assumption is that individuals have the capacities and willingness to volunteer on behalf of their communities to provide the things the community needs. The volunteer is talked of as a vital member of British society. Most British adults undertake some sort of voluntary unpaid work, whether this be informal activity such as providing help to family and non-family members within their community, or more formal activity such as providing regular help to an organisation, campaigning about a particular issue; or being politically active. We know a lot about volunteering in Britain today from statistical sources such as surveys, but these often provide static pictures of volunteering at specific points. We know little about how attitudes to volunteering, and volunteering behaviours, have continued or changed over time, or about how those trends relate to wider socioeconomic changes. Our project will look at volunteering between 1981-2012, a timeframe which includes a period of recession and public service cuts until the mid-1990s, followed by a period of relative prosperity in the mid-1990s-2008, and then by the current downturn. We will look for changes and continuities in volunteering during these different periods, exploring how individuals' motivations to volunteer have changed over time. Have there been changes in the socio-economic characteristics of volunteers over time? How have volunteers balanced paid and unpaid work? Do today's volunteers feel that they have further capacity to volunteer, if required to do so? What views have individuals held, on who should meet public need - the state, the local community, or the individual? How have these changed over time? Answers to these questions need to be based on longitudinal data that follow individuals over time. Ideally we need to provide estimates that are representative of the population as well as detailed insights into individuals' views. To meet these needs, we are proposing an innovative mixed-methods approach. We will examine data from the Mass Observation Project, where people freely write on topics such as voluntary unpaid work, welfare, volunteering and the state. This gives rich longitudinal information that provide us with insight into how and why people change or continue with particular view points and volunteering behaviours. We will complement this qualitative data with longitudinal survey data sets. The analysis will include panel data that ask the same questions about volunteering of a representative sample of people, following them over a number of years, and repeated cross-sectional survey data that ask questions about how people feel about provision of welfare benefits, and the role of the government in meeting particular social needs at a particular point in time. These population-level quantitative data give us a good understanding of change and continuity in volunteering. This reuse and bringing together of qualitative writing and survey data represents a new way of looking at volunteering. It also represents a new way of thinking about how we use data, and may be of value to others researching in the field of sociology, social policy or contemporary British social history. This study generates impact by contributing to academic and non-academic understanding of volunteering, furthers knowledge in relation to methodological approaches by combining longitudinal qualitative and quantitative data, and informs debates around contemporary policy interventions