Legacy Volunteering: A Test of Two Theories of Intergenerational Transmission

Sociological theory suggests two reasons that volunteering runs in families. The first is that parents act as role models. The second is that parents who volunteer pass on the socioeconomic resources needed to do volunteer work. Panel data from two generations of women (N = 1,848) are analyzed to see how much influence family socioeconomic status and mother's volunteering have on daughter's volunteer careers. More highly educated women and women whose mothers volunteered donate more hours initially, but only family socioeconomic status increases volunteering over the life course. Key Words: intergenerational transmission, role modeling, volunteering. Societies reproduce themselves principally through families. As they do so, they reproduce their inequalities. By tracing how families pass on their advantages and disadvantages, we understand more clearly the causes of differential access to social resources and opportunities within each generation. Although families are not the only institution by which societies reproduce themselves, cross-generational continuities in education, income, occupation, and wealth are an enduring fact of social life. The role of families in the reproduction of economic inequalities across generations has been thoroughly researched, but the part they play in the reproduction of other kinds of capital has received less attention. The stratification of social and cultural capital is usually represented as being the result of concurrent social conditions. Middle-class people, so the argument goes, prefer specific kinds of leisure time pursuits, such as hobbies, sports, and charitable work, because of their educational and occupational status or because of the social networks in which they are embedded In this study, we analyze the intergeneralional transmission of volunteering, focusing on a panel study in which the volunteer work of a sample of American women and their daughters was tracked over an extended period of time. Volunteer work is any activity in which time is given freely to benefit another person, group, or organization (Wilson, 2000). Volunteer work has traditionally been thought of as a female activity (Daniels, 1988, p. 8). Women are more likely than men to be allocated the kinds of chores that are an extension of housework and child care, such as attending parent-teacher association meetings. Mothers act as "keepers of friends, neighbors, and even those strangers served by local volunteer groups" (Gerstel, 2002, p. 258). VOLUNTEERING AS A LEGACY Practitioners in the nonprofit sector often refer to children who adopt the volunteer habits of their parents as legacy volunteers. Families are an important conduit to volunteer work. Americans are twice as likely to volunteer if their parents volunteered (Hodgkinson & Weitzman, 1992; see also Clary & Miller, 1986; Nolin, Chaney, Chapman, & Chandler, 1997; Sundeen & Raskoff, 1994; Wuthnow, 1995). Although the facts are clear that volunteering can be transmitted from generation to generation, the mechanisms that make this possible are by no means obvious. At the most general level, it is possible to distinguish two theories, each indicating a specific mechanism. The first theory argues that social reproduction rests on agreement at the level of values and beliefs. It focuses on socialization processes (Moen, Erickson, & Dempster-McClain, 1997). Although socialization takes place in many arenas, including schools, churches, and peer groups, "[t]he family is usually considered the most important mechanism in value socialization" (Bengtson, 1975, p. 358). Parents can socialize their children in a number of ways. For some, it is a matter of setting priorities. Forty-three percent of high school-age volunteers said that their parents emphasized community involvement, compared to only 12% among those who were not doing volunteer work (Prudential Spirit of Community Youth Survey, 1995). …