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How can computational social science (CSS) methods be applied in nonprofit and philanthropic studies? This paper summarizes and explains a range of relevant CSS methods from a research design perspective and highlights key applications in our field. We define CSS as a set of computationally intensive empirical methods for data management, concept representation, data analysis, and visualization. What makes the computational methods “social” is that the purpose of using these methods is to serve quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods social science research, such that theorization can have a solid ground. We illustrate the promise of CSS in our field by using it to construct the largest and most comprehensive database of scholarly references in our field, the Knowledge Infrastructure of Nonprofit and Philanthropic Studies (KINPS). Furthermore, we show that through the application of CSS in constructing and analyzing KINPS, we can better understand and facilitate the intellectual growth of our field. We conclude the article with cautions for using CSS and suggestions for future studies implementing CSS and KINPS.

There is a vast literature on the health benefits associated with volunteering for volunteers. Such health advantages are likely to vary across groups of volunteers with different characteristics. The current paper aims to examine the health advantages of volunteering for European volunteers and explore heterogeneity in the association between volunteering and health. We carry out a mega-analysis on microdata from six panel surveys, covering 952,026 observations from 267,212 respondents in 22 European countries. We provide open access to the code we developed for data harmonization. We use ordinary least squares, fixed effects, first difference, and fixed effect quantile regressions to estimate how volunteering activities and changes therein are related to self-rated health for different groups. Our results indicate a small but consistently positive association between changes in volunteering and changes in health within individuals. This association is stronger for older adults. For respondents 60 years and older, within-person changes in volunteering are significantly related to changes in self-rated health. Additionally, the health advantage of volunteering is larger for respondents in worse health. The advantage is largest at the lowest decile and gradually declines along the health distribution. The magnitude of the association at the first decile is about twice the magnitude of the association at the ninth decile. These results suggest that volunteering may be more beneficial for the health of specific groups in society. With small health advantages from year to year, volunteering may protect older and less healthy adults from health decline in the long run.The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10433-022-00691-5.

Are private donors willing to replace cuts in government funding? The authors conducted a survey experiment (n = 2,458) to examine how information about government funding affected decisions to donate money to a large charitable organization in the Netherlands. Providing information about actual budget cuts increased the number of donors. Most new donors were recruited among respondents who had processed the information correctly, underlining the importance of effective communication. The magnitude of the information effect was stronger for citizens with lower levels of empathic concern, who are less likely to donate but can be converted into donors. The authors conclude that policy information shapes not only attitudes but also civic engagement outside the political sphere.

Many colleges and universities have embraced the goal of increasing students’ civic-mindedness. The research associated with theorizing and measuring civic-mindedness, however, has thus far progressed in a silo away from the established literature of personality psychology. This paper bridges this gap—adopting civic efficacy and service motivation as two measures of civic-mindedness—and examines how well they are explained by the five-factor model of personality (FFM). Using survey data from undergraduate students at a large, public research university, we estimated a structural equation model to measure personality traits from the FFM, service motivation, and civic efficacy. Results showed that variation in personality accounts for approximately 40 percent of the variation in Service Motivation and 53 percent of the variation in Civic Efficacy, which does not support a clear assertion that either construct can neatly be categorized as a facet of the FFM. Our findings provide additional theoretical basis for community service learning courses and other educational opportunities that blend traditional pedagogical strategies with experiential and reflective opportunities aiming to produce change across state-like and trait-like attributes.

In this article, we examine whether and how the institutional context matters when understanding individuals’ giving to philanthropic organizations. We posit that both the individuals’ propensity to give and the amounts given are higher in countries with a stronger institutional context for philanthropy. We examine key factors of formal and informal institutional contexts for philanthropy at both the organizational and societal levels, including regulatory and legislative frameworks, professional standards, and social practices. Our results show that while aggregate levels of giving are higher in countries with stronger institutionalization, multilevel analyses of 118,788 individuals in 19 countries show limited support for the hypothesized relationships between institutional context and philanthropy. The findings suggest the need for better comparative data to understand the complex and dynamic influences of institutional contexts on charitable giving. This, in turn, would support the development of evidence-based practices and policies in the field of global philanthropy.

Since 1989, the Dutch Charity Lotteries have provided multiyear unrestricted funding, a type of grantmaking that is fairly unique for the Netherlands, to a wide range of nonprofits at home and abroad. This article shares insights into how unrestricted grantmaking influences the relationship between funders and grantees, specifically highlighting how staff at a sample of grantee organizations experience collaboration with this large social enterprise. It discusses hidden and invisible power dynamics that exist in the relationship, even when there are few formal restrictions on grantees' spending. • Grantee representatives interviewed for this study stated that openness and honesty in communication with the Dutch Charity Lotteries leads to mutual trust, and that they experience few formal restrictions. Nevertheless, even unrestricted funding may come with stated or unstated expectations from the funder, and many grantees reported that receiving the grant support leaves them with a sense that they have to “prove they're worth it.” Relaxing formal restrictions gives rise to some uncertainty about what grantees actually have to “prove.” • To ensure a more equal collaboration, it is advisable for foundations to try to detect and consider expectations that are explicit and implicit, conscious and unconscious, and address these. This article offers suggestions for how foundations can do so.

Besides the standard survey instruments that are based on closed-ended items, open-ended questions can provide rich data. In this document I analyze the answers to an open-ended survey question in which respondents are asked to imagine themselves in the future. I go through the analysis step by step, sharing R script and output. Data are used from the A Broader Mind Longitudinal Survey, an annual survey that tracks the civic, social, professional and academic development of students at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) distinguished three topics in the open answers, reflecting the importance of (1) a steady job, (2) sufficient time for family, and (3) a contribution to society. A survey experiment showed that the wording of the question affected the prevalence of topics.

This field note is an invitation for interested researchers to join an innovative global study dedicated to describing, analysing, and understanding the ways in which the provision of unrestricted grant funding unfolds in terms of organisational behaviour and project outcomes.

Previous scholarship has shown evidence of a positive relationship between volunteering and improved measures of mental and physical wellbeing. It has also been suggested that volunteering may help individuals navigate transitions between different life stages by encouraging them to become more involved in their communities, thereby building new social connections and improving networks of social support. Using Waves 2 and 3 of panel data from the Midlife in the United States Survey, we examined whether volunteering can buffer against the negative effects of low self-esteem on correlates of psychosocial wellbeing in adults from mid- to later-life. Results indicated that participation in volunteering mitigates the negative effects of adults’ low self-esteem on their sense of belonging and life satisfaction. In particular, we determined the adverse effect of negative self-esteem at time T1 on our wellbeing measures (belonging to the community and life satisfaction) at T2 above and beyond the effects of the same measures at T1 and the covariates. Furthermore, we found positive evidence for the moderating influence of volunteering on the relationship between negative self-esteem and both measures of wellbeing, although the effect was stronger for life satisfaction than for belonging. These conclusions suggest that volunteering acts as a buffer for ageing adults, with possible public health implications.

Do government expenditures shift private philanthropic donations to particular fields of welfare? We examine this association in the first cross-country study to correlate government expenditures with the level of individual private donations to different fields of welfare using the Individual International Philanthropy Database (IIPD, 2016; N country = 19; N individual = 126,923). The results of the descriptive and multilevel analyses support the idea of crosswise crowding-in; in countries where government expenditures in health and social protection are higher, more donors give to support the environment, international aid, and the arts. The level of giving to different sectors, however, is not associated with government expenditures. The results reject the crowding-out hypothesis and provide a nuanced picture of the relationship between government funding and philanthropic giving across different fields of social welfare.

When are donations to non-profit organizations responsive to changes in government funding? This article examines relations between government financial support and charitable donations in an innovative mixed-methods design. A unique data set is obtained, matching individual-level survey data from the Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey with media coverage of government support from LexisNexis and organizational-level information from the Dutch Central Bureau on Fundraising from 2002 to 2014. An interpretative analysis shows the ways in which people are informed about changes in public funding, which is assumed to be a prerequisite for donors to change their donations. Media coverage often does not reflect actual changes in government support. Additionally, regression analyses are deployed to examine how changes in government support and media reports are associated with changes in donations. The results show that responses to public funding are dependent on the non-profit context. Donations in the fields of social services, health, and nature are displaced by government support, while crowding-out does not occur in the field of international development. Even in fields where crowding-out is more likely to occur, the increase in donations does not offset the decrease in public support. The conclusions nuance popular beliefs about the direct consequences that policy changes have for public awareness and participation.

An important question in public economics is to what extent changes in government funding lead to changes in private donations. In this chapter we identify and summarize four theoretical perspectives answering this question: the micro-economic, institutional-political, institutional signaling, and organizational perspective. Reviewing the empirical support for each perspective, we find that none of the perspectives sufficiently explains the dispersed empirical evidence for the relationship between government financial support and individual philanthropic donations. We argue that the context in which nonprofit organizations operate is a relevant but often overlooked factor that influences how government support affects philanthropic giving. Research in this area should adopt a dynamic perspective, taking into account the dynamics of different nonprofit revenue streams (from governments, businesses, foundations, and households) as well as contextual level factors like the subsector of the nonprofit sector and country characteristics.

This field note is an invitation for interested researchers to join an innovative global study dedicated to describing, analysing, and understanding the ways in which the provision of unrestricted grant funding unfolds in terms of organisational behaviour and project outcomes.

This report documents the development of the A Broader Mind Longitudinal Survey at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The survey is designed to track the personal, academic, civic, and professional development of students as they progress through their study program. We survey students at VU Amsterdam at least every year to measure the attitudes, values, skills and behaviors reflecting “A Broader Mind” among students at VU Amsterdam. The survey provides a barometer of student life: how are students doing with respect to civic‐mindedness, student engagement, professional orientation?

Building on theories from different fields, we discuss the roles that volunteers can play in the generation, implementation, and diffusion of social innovations. We present a study relying on 26 interviews with volunteer managers, other professionals, volunteers, and one former volunteer in 17 (branches of) third sector organizations in eight European countries. We identify organizational factors that help and hinder volunteer contributions to social innovation. While volunteer contributions to social innovations are encouraged by decentralized organizational structures, systematic “scaling up” of ideas, providing training, and giving a sense of ownership, they are hindered by a reluctant attitude and a lack of resources . This rich, explorative study makes it a fruitful start for further research on the relationship between volunteering and social innovation.

Women’s philanthropy has drawn much attention during recent years, mostly in studies from the United States or the United Kingdom. Relevant issues are to what extent gender differences in charitable giving exist in another national context and how these differences can be explained. In this study, we examine female and male giving in the Netherlands, using a representative sample of Dutch households ( N = 1,692) from the 2010 wave of the Giving in the Netherlands Panel Survey (GINPS). We conduct bivariate and multivariate regression analyses to test for gender differences and the extent to which they are mediated by values, costs, solicitation, and social pressure. Females turn out to be more likely to give and to give to more different sectors, which can be attributed to their higher prosocial values of empathic concern and the principle of care. Contrary to recent findings in the United States, Dutch males donate higher amounts than Dutch females.

With the growing body of literature on governance styles in which nonprofit organizations are involved in creating and implementing public services, there is a need for robust evidence on the effects of public funding on nonprofit revenues. This paper systematically reviews previous studies on the crowding-out hypothesis, which holds that private charitable donations are lower in situations of higher government support and vice versa. We find that about two-thirds of previous estimates find a negative correlation (crowding-out), while one-third of the estimates find a positive correlation (crowding-in). The results are strongly shaped by the research methods that are used. In experiments, a $1 increase in government support is associated with an average $0.64 decrease in private donations, while nonexperimental data analyses find an average increase of $0.06. Random-effects regression models show that, contrary to arguments that are prevalent in the literature, studies that take subsidies to organizations as a measure of government support are less likely to estimate crowding-out than studies that use a measure of direct government expenditures. Central government support is associated with higher charitable donations, while measures that include multiple levels of government tend to find negative correlations. The results challenge the consistency of prior research findings and demonstrate the contextual dependence of the validity of the crowding-out hypothesis.

De Wit, A., Bekkers, R., & Broese Van Groenou, M. (2017). Heterogeneity in Crowding-out: When Are Charitable Donations Responsive To Government Support? European Sociological Review, 33(1), 59-71.

Governments serve the public interest by regulating land use in favour of democratically determined objectives. While people can become involved in allocation processes through pre-structured participation, uninvited entry into planning processes may occur too. This article studies the latter, seeking to highlight the mechanisms of interaction between local governments and local opposition groups (LOGs) when conflict occurs about housing projects and industrial sites. We argue that because formal decisional power has a predefined territory, the effectiveness of self-organized LOGs is highly influenced by the decisional configuration. We analyse two cases of contestation in recent Dutch planning practice and attempt to link the spatiality of power with the concepts of 'spaces of engagement' and a 'political opportunity structure'. In the case of strong municipal autonomy, administrative borders appear to be important for local opposition strategies and for the way in which they shape urban and regional geography.

Location is a fundamental aspect of spatial planning. It is subject to, and the result of, planning activities. It is therefore not surprising that the first incentives for the development of tools for spatial data management and spatial analysis came from professionals who were engaged in spatial planning. This chapter describes the development and interaction between the evolvement of spatial planning and the rapid development of Geo-ICT in the past decades. This is illustrated with examples of Geo-ICT applications used for spatial planning over the years, from very basic land use models via more advanced models to integrated systems supporting discussion and decision making. Key issues as the growing importance of the communicative aspects of planning processes and the concept of planning as a participatory process are adressed. Through the revolutionary development of internet technology along with geospatial technology new future crossroads between Geo-ICT and spatial planning are foreseen. Although Geo-ICT and spatial planning appear to be closely related interrelated in scientific development, it is stated that the use of Geo-ICT in spatial planning practice lags behind expectations. The key obstacles related to this in methodology, data and competences are reviewed.