Ethnicity, Acculturation, and Volunteering to Organizations

This article reports the findings of a study of volunteering to organizations among native-born and immigrant African Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and Whites in the United States. The authors focus on the questions, do ethnic groups differ in their likelihood of volunteering, and are these differences a function of acculturation? The conceptual framework to explain formal volunteering includes acculturation, personal and social capital, gender, and age. Using logistic regression analysis, the authors find that acculturation explains formal volunteering only partially and differently among the groups and that each native-born and immigrant group has its own unique combination of predictors of volunteering.