Major Findings

Volunteering in HIgh School
We began the survey by telling respondents what we meant by “volunteer activities.”  To compare Holy Cross students with college students nationally, we used the CPS definition: Activities for which people are not paid, except certain expenses, which the person did through or for an organization.  This definition thus excluded informal helping behavior.  For example, a Holy Cross student who assisted a middle-school student with her homework through the Main South Homework Center would be considered a volunteer, but someone who, on her own, helped a fellow student with her homework would not.

Having provided this definition, we asked students if they had done volunteer work for a church, school, political group, senior citizens group, or any other organization when they were in high school.  A 2005 national survey of American youth (Youth Volunteering Survey) indicated that 58 percent of high school students had volunteered through a formal organization to some extent in 2004.  The vast majority were occasional or episodic volunteers who served, on average, fewer than 12 weeks and less than 20 hours during the past year; 24 percent volunteered on a regular basis, that is, 12 or more weeks, typically contributing 80 hours per year.  By comparison, 98 percent of Holy Cross students reported that they had volunteered in high school; nearly 70 percent volunteered more than once a month; and they averaged well over 100 hours of volunteer service per year.

The Youth Volunteering Survey found that volunteering among youth was fostered by three key social institutions: family, church, and school.  Youths were more likely to volunteer and to do so regularly when a family member volunteered, when they attended religious services weekly, and when they were in school, especially a private school, and performed well academically.  Schools are a particularly important influence as an increasing number of high school students perform community service as part of a school activity or requirement.  Indeed, for nearly half of Holy Cross students, including two-thirds of those who attended a private school and one-third from public schools, volunteer work was a high school graduation requirement.  Holy Cross students who volunteered “regularly” in high school also were more likely to report that either or both of their parents volunteered when they were growing up.  Below we examine the influence of family, religion, and academic performance on volunteering at Holy Cross.

Volunteering at Holy Cross
At Holy Cross, students are afforded many opportunities to perform volunteer service, both inside and outside the campus community.  They can join one of numerous service organizations, such as Habitat for Humanity and Student Coalition on Hunger and Homelessness (SCOHAH), which raise awareness of important issues or provide direct services to the Worcester community; they may become peer educators who offer programming and peer support on eating disorders, sexual assault, alcohol use, and other concerns; they can offer tours to or host prospective students; they may assist in worship services as members of the choir or Eucharistic ministers; they may travel to Appalachia or the Gulf Coast during Spring Break to paint and repair homes and provide other services; they may become science ambassadors who conduct science shows for the community such as “Hogwarts at Holy Cross”; and as members of a Holy Cross sports team, they may participate in a community outreach program in the Worcester schools.  In the spring HCSS, we asked students specifically about all these activities and more.

Table 1 presents the percentage of all Holy Cross students and the percentage of seniors who reported that they had served in each of several types of volunteer programs.  The biggest source of volunteer work, indeed the largest student organization on campus, is Student Programs for Urban Development (SPUD).  Begun in 1967 by Pat Clancy, class of ’68, SPUD is a service organization that provides opportunities for students to work with the poor and the needy in the city of Worcester.  In spring 2007, SPUD was composed of 41 public service programs, each linked to a Worcester agency.  For example, students helped staff Abby’s Friends, a temporary shelter for women and children; served as a Big Brother or Sister to children at the Worcester Boys and Girls Club; tutored adults who were learning English as a second language at St. Joan of Arc; helped middle school students with their homework at the Main South Community Center; and distributed food and stocked shelves at St. Paul’s Outreach, a food pantry.  An estimated 740 Holy Cross students, almost one-third of the student body, took part in one of the 41 SPUD initiatives during spring 2007.  Over half of the respondents reported that they had participated in SPUD, a figure that increased from 37 percent of first-year students to 65 percent of fourth-year students.  Moreover, for many students, participation in SPUD was a sustained commitment.  Four of five volunteers attended a SPUD program 1-2 hours weekly; over half of upper-class volunteers had served for more than one semester, often in two or more different programs.

Table 8.1. Percentage of all Students and Seniors Who Have Participated in Each
Type of Volunteer Program.

The center of voluntarism at Holy Cross is the Campus Ministry Center.  In addition to sponsoring SPUD, Campus Ministry provides several volunteer opportunities related to worship and social justice.  Students may participate in the liturgical ministry as a member of the church choir, liturgical dancer, or as a Eucharistic minister, greeter, lector, alter server, cantor or liturgical coordinator; they may become a leader for Escape or Manresa retreats; they may be members of one of several justice-oriented organizations such as Pax Christi and Students for Life; or they can serve in an “immersion” program in Appalachia and the Gulf region during Spring Break or in Jamaica, Mexico, and Kenya during the summer.  The participation rate of seniors indicated that before they graduate, half of Holy Cross students take part in one or more of these Campus Ministry programs.

Another hub of volunteer activity at Holy Cross is the Admissions Office.  A third of the respondents reported that they had done volunteer work for Admissions as ambassadors, senior interviewers, tour guides, or hosts for prospective students.  Almost as many students indicated that they had participated in Holy Cross Cares Day, conducted annually in early spring since 1998.  On this day 300-400 students, faculty, and staff spend time at several sites throughout Worcester performing service-oriented activities such as cleaning up trash, raking, and painting.  A majority of varsity athletes, representing 12 percent of Holy Cross students, also had performed various forms of sports outreach, such as mentoring and helping students with homework, providing clinics, and visiting handicapped children.  Altogether, counting each SPUD initiative separately, Holy Cross students participate in approximately 100 different volunteer programs.

Based on available comparisons, the level of voluntarism among Holy Cross students is extraordinarily high.  The 2005 CPS found that 30.2 percent of 16 to 24 year-old students enrolled in college had performed volunteer service during the past year.  Similarly, based on a compilation of reports from 580 institutions, over half of which were liberal arts colleges, Campus Compact estimated that 32 percent of students were involved in community service in the 2005-2006 academic year.  Unlike these surveys, we did not ask students directly if they had volunteered during the past year.  Instead, after asking students if they had ever participated in any of 20 different programs or if they had done any other volunteer work, we asked how many hours per week they currently were volunteering at Holy Cross.  Compared to college students nationally, voluntarism at Holy Cross was more than twice as common, as 68 percent of the respondents reported that they were doing a half hour or more of volunteer work per week during the spring term.  At the time of the survey—in the middle of the spring term—84 percent of the respondents reported that they had participated in at least one volunteer program while at Holy Cross.  This figure increased with each academic class, so that at the end of four years, 96 percent of Holy Cross seniors had done volunteer service during their four years.

In the CPS, respondents who volunteered were asked about the type of activities they performed for the main organization for which they volunteered.  In 2005, 26.6 percent of college student volunteers tutored or taught, 23.8 percent mentored, 23.1 percent raised funds or sold items to raise money, 20.5 percent collected, prepared, distributed or served food, and 19.9 percent engaged in general labor or supplied transportation.  For comparison, we asked students about the types of activities they performed through SPUD.  Table 8.2 shows the activities reported by SPUD volunteers.  The activities reflect both available opportunities as well as students’ choices about volunteer work.  Like college students nationally, the most frequent activity was tutoring or teaching, followed by mentoring.  In addition, sizeable numbers of students collected, prepared, distributed, or served food, helped staff a shelter, coached or refereed a sport team, performed welfare advocacy tasks, and visited or provided recreation for the ill or elderly.

Table 8.2.  Activities Performed by SPUD Volunteers as a Percentage of Activities (N=293) and Volunteers (N=165).

Community-Based Learning
An important extension of voluntarism is service learning.  Service learning differs from voluntarism by integrating community service with academic courses or personal reflection on the act of serving.  To promote service-learning, in September 2001 Holy Cross created the Donelan Office of Community-Based Learning.  Since its inception, this office annually has overseen an average of over 30 community-based learning (CBL) courses with enrollments exceeding 600 students.  One in five of our respondents reported that they had taken at least one CBL course, the most popular of which were Social Ethics, Faith and World Poverty, and Introduction to Women and Gender Studies.  As with volunteering, the percentage of students who had taken a CBL course increased with class year, from 8 percent of first-year students to one-third of seniors.  Community service is mandatory in 90 percent of CBL courses; but even if not required, most students elect to do it.  About 60 percent of the students met their CBL community service requirement through SPUD.

Future Plans to Volunteer
To gauge post-graduation plans for volunteer service, we asked students how likely they were to do full-time volunteer service in an organization such as the Peace Corps, Jesuit Volunteer Corps, or Teach for America, and to do volunteer work in their community.  Two in five students said that they were either very likely (11.5%) or somewhat likely (28.2%) to do full-time volunteer service; over 90 percent projected that they were very likely (45.5%) or somewhat likely (47.4%) to volunteer within their community.  Even if the latter percentages turn out to be one-half the self-projections, Holy Cross graduates would far exceed the 2005 CPS-estimated 29 percent volunteer rate among the U.S. adult population.

Donating Blood
A unique form of volunteering, which was not included in the CPS list of volunteer activities and often is not counted as “volunteer work,” is donating blood.  Unlike other kinds of volunteering, donating blood is a passive, indirect form of helping others that may involve some pain, discomfort, or anxiety (Dovidio et al., 2006).  It also is relatively less common than many other volunteer activities, although estimates range widely.  Based on the 2003-2004 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, an estimated 4.4 percent of the adult population had donated blood in the past 12 months; but based on the 2002 and 2004 GSS, the estimate was 17.1 percent.

Sponsored by the student organization Purple Key Society, the Red Cross conducts daylong blood drives four times each year at the College.  Typically as many as 100 or more students, staff, and faculty donate 70-100 pints per drive.  When asked about blood donation, one in five students, including 30 percent of seniors, reported that they had given blood at Holy Cross.  Among second- through fourth-year students, 65 percent of donors had donated more than once and almost a third had done so 5-8 times.

Forms of Helping Other than Volunteering
Besides volunteering and giving blood, we asked students how often they had engaged in several informal and formal helping behaviors since the beginning of the current school year.  Table 8.3 presents the findings for this part of the survey.  Several of the items were included in the 2002 and 2004 General Social Surveys.  The GSS used a longer time frame—asking respondents about frequency of activities within the past year; however, half the response categories are directly comparable (see footnote to Table 8.3), and by converting responses to an estimated number of times per year, we were able to compare Holy Cross students with a national sample on common questions.

The table shows that a majority of Holy Cross students performed 10 of the 16 helping acts since the beginning of the school year.  Seven of these acts were so prevalent (occurring among 90 percent of respondents, usually twice a month or more) as to appear normative:  allowing a stranger to go ahead of you in line; giving directions to a stranger; loaning clothing, money, or some other item; helping someone with their homework; and holding or opening the door for someone.  On the one hand, adults nationally were more likely than Holy Cross students to have given food or money to a homeless person, to have given money to a charity, and to have returned money to a cashier when they got too much money in change.  On the other hand, Holy Cross students were more likely to offer their seat to a stranger and to loan an item of value to someone; they also reported that they allowed a stranger to go ahead of them in line twice as often as American adults.  It seems likely that the frequency of many of these acts, which involve informal or spontaneous helping, is largely a matter of situational opportunity.  Students in a setting like Holy Cross, for example, are much less likely than adults outside the College to encounter a homeless person, but they are more likely to be asked by fellow students to loan things.

Table 8.3.  Percentage and Estimated Number of Times Per Year (Freq.) of Various Helping
Behaviors among Holy Cross Students (N=312) and the 2002 and 2004 GSS Samples of
American Adults (N=2,670).

*Original response categories converted to get estimated number of times per year as follows: Not at all = 0; Once = 1; At least 2 or 3 times = 3; Once a month = 12; Once a week = 52; More than once a week = 75.
†GSS item: “Let someone you didn’t know well borrow an item of some value like dishes or tools.”

Who Volunteers?
To determine characteristics associated with volunteering at Holy Cross, we examined four primary indicators: whether a student had volunteered at Holy Cross (VOLHC); the number of volunteer activities in which a student had participated (VOLACTHC); whether a student volunteered in spring 2007 (VOL2007); and the number of hours devoted to volunteer work in spring 2007 (VOLHRS2007).

Academic class.  We have noted repeatedly that many forms of volunteering increase with each academic class, so that nearly all seniors will have done formal volunteer work at Holy Cross before they graduate.  In fact, all four indicators were associated with academic class; VOLHC and VOLACTHC were most strongly associated, although the biggest increments in volunteering occurred from the first to the second year.  Research suggests that two developmental processes may account for some of this increase (Dovidio et al., 2006).  First, as adolescents grow older they become somewhat less egocentric and more inclined to see the world from the perspective of other people; consequently, they understand others’ needs and are more likely to help satisfy those needs.  Second, through socialization, adolescents learn and ultimately internalize the societal value of helping others.

We suspect, however, that the increase results primarily from a culture of voluntarism fostered by the religious identity and mission of the College.  To explore this possibility, we analyzed responses to three questions:  Have you read the College Mission Statement?  If so, have you discussed it in class or personally with others?  Have you ever taken a course in high school or college in which you learned about Catholic social teaching?  Responses to all three questions were related to all four volunteer indicators.  For example, in spring 2007 students who had read the Mission Statement were 14.1 percent more likely to volunteer (VOL2007) than those who had not; students who had read and discussed the Mission Statement with others were 25.0 percent more likely to volunteer than those who had read but not discussed it; and those who had taken a course in Catholic social teaching were 9.8 percent more likely to volunteer.

Gender.  Beyond this cultural influence, there were other individual differences, many of which were consistent with prior research.  Research has shown that women are more likely to engage in many forms of prosocial behavior than men.  In the 2007 HCSS, women were more likely to volunteer than men on all four indicators.  This gender difference pertained to most volunteer programs; for example, women were 26 percent more likely to have participated in SPUD and 12.5 percent more likely to have participated in a religious or social justice program.  On the other hand, there was no gender difference in donating blood and no consistent difference in informal helping.  Men were more likely to have allowed a stranger to go ahead in line, offered their seat to a stranger, and opened the door for someone; but women were more likely to have lent an item of clothing and given a card or flowers to someone for no reason.

Family.  Research also shows that family plays an important role in volunteering and helping.  As noted earlier, teens are more likely to volunteer when one or both parents had volunteered.  We found, however, that whether a parent had volunteered and whether a student had done volunteer work with his or her parents were unrelated to any of the four indicators of voluntarism at Holy Cross.  In addition, whether a student had given blood at Holy Cross was not significantly related to whether his or her parents had donated blood.

Religion.  Another consistent predictor of voluntarism is religion.  People who identify with an organized religion are more likely to volunteer than those who don’t; and the more religious someone is, the more likely he or she is to volunteer.  With Catholics constituting the vast majority of Holy Cross students, and very few students who do not identify with an organized religion, there is too little variation to examine the influence of religious preference.  We did, however, use two questions to create an index of religiosity: how strong was the respondent’s religion identity and how often did he or she attend religious services.  The religiosity index was correlated with all four volunteer indicators.  For example, the higher students scored on the religiosity index, the more likely they were to have volunteered at Holy Cross (VOLHC) and the more hours per week they volunteered during the spring term (VOLHRS2007).  Further analysis indicated that this association was not due to gender.  But part of the association was accounted for by a higher incidence of religious volunteering among more religious students, as religiosity was unrelated to some other forms of volunteering, such as SPUD and admissions.

Academic performance.  As we noted above, the 2005 Youth Volunteering Survey found a relationship between academic performance and volunteering: The higher the grade-point average (GPA), the more likely that teens volunteered and volunteered regularly.  The authors of a report on this survey (Grimm et al., 2005) speculated that students who do well academically may have more positive outlooks and social networks that encourage volunteering, “may have more opportunities to be asked to volunteer, and may feel more empowered to effect change in their community.”  At Holy Cross, we suspect that students who perform at a high level academically may have stronger ties with and be more involved in the college community in a variety of ways, including volunteering.  At the end of the survey, we asked students for permission to obtain grades from official college records; 96 percent of respondents granted permission.  GPA was not associated with whether a student had volunteered at Holy Cross; however, it was positively correlated with the other three volunteer indicators.  Thus, the higher a student’s GPA, the higher the number of volunteer activities in which he or she participated and the more hours per week devoted to volunteering.  GPA was most strongly associated with volunteering for SPUD; it was not associated with volunteering for admissions.

Time devoted to other activities.  Another factor that accounts for variations in helping behavior is perceived costs.  Volunteers may incur costs in terms of time, effort, and money; blood donors also may experience anxiety and pain.  We did not measure costs directly in the 2007 HCSS; however, we did ask students how much time they devoted to employment, study, and extracurricular activities other than volunteering.  We assumed that the more time required of these commitments, the more costly volunteering was likely to be.  The only time commitment related as expected to volunteering was the number of hours devoted to extracurricular activities; as extracurricular hours increased, number of volunteer hours (VOLHRS2007) decreased.  This negative association occurred mainly because intercollegiate athletes tended to be high in extracurricular hours and relatively low in weekly hours of volunteering.  Like college students nationally who worked part-time 15 or fewer hours per week, Holy Cross students who worked part-time engaged in more volunteer activities and volunteered more hours per week than those who were not employed.

A Methodologcial Note
Based on a sample of 312, the estimated margin of random sampling error in the 2007 spring survey is 5.5 percent, which means, for example, that if a reported percentage is 45, the percentage for all Holy Cross students is very likely (95 chances in 100) to fall between 39.5 and 50.5.  This estimate does not include error that may occur when respondents misinterpret questions, don’t remember correctly, or answer untruthfully (measurement error).  Nor does it include error due to nonresponse—differences between sampled individuals who participated in the survey and those who did not (unit nonresponse) or between those who responded to a question and those who chose not to answer (item nonresponse).

We can only speculate about the amount of measurement error.  Because altruism is socially valued, it is possible that some respondents overestimated some forms of helping to make a favorable impression on the interviewer.  But we suspect that there is relatively little error in most of our estimates of formal volunteering, simply because these estimates were based on responses to questions about highly specific forms of volunteer service, such as whether a student participated in SPUD, the liturgical ministries, or the Spring Break Immersion Program.  Reporting that one has not participated in these programs is not likely to be perceived as lowering the interviewer’s esteem for the respondent; therefore, there is no reason to answer untruthfully.

Except for a question about parents’ income, nearly all respondents answered every question, so there was very little error due to item nonresponse.  Error due to unit nonresponse is greatest when the response rate is low; however, the response rate in the spring 2007 HCSS was a relatively high 82 percent.  So, ordinarily, we should not be too concerned about this source of error.  But the act of agreeing to participate in this survey was itself a form of the behavior we were attempting to measure, which raises the question of whether those who volunteered for the survey are more likely to be helpful and to perform volunteer service than those who did not participate.  A crude check for nonresponse error sometimes is made by comparing the sample with known characteristics of the population, as we have done in Table 8.4.  As the table shows, our completed cases (respondents) over-represent women and under-represent seniors.  But these percentages differ by only 3.2 and 2.5 percent, respectively; moreover, because women tend to have higher rates of voluntarism than men and seniors tend to have higher rates of voluntarism than other classes, these two possible sources of error are likely to offset one another. 

Table 8.4.  Comparison of Respondents (N=312), Sample (N=380), and Population (N=2,528) on Gender and Academic Class.

In the HCSS, very few sampled students outright refuse to be interviewed.  Some fail to show up for scheduled interviews; others seem to actively avoid the interviewer; and still others are simply never contacted.  Most of these respondents could be interviewed if the interviewer were more persistent and more persuasive.  But what if students who were hardest to persuade also were least helpful and least likely to volunteer at Holy Cross?  This could create nonresponse error because disproportionately excluding students who do not volunteer would tend to inflate estimates of voluntarism.  Fortunately, we can address this question by comparing volunteer rates across interviewers.