The Dual Structure of Volunteering During Crises: A Task-Driven Approach to Volunteering

This article develops and tests a theoretical model of volunteering during crises suggesting a dual structure referring to the mobilization of two types of volunteers engaging in different voluntary tasks. By combining theories on civic virtue and crisis adaption, I develop and test the theoretical model using survey data on a representative random sample of Danish adults collected during the pandemic in 2020. The results of the analysis support some parts of the model as volunteers fall into two groups. One group of previous volunteers had high levels of generalized trust and took on both ordinary volunteering and COVID-19-specific voluntary tasks. Another group of new volunteers had high levels of anxiety and almost exclusively engaged in COVID-19-specific tasks. The article contributes to volunteering and crisis research by demonstrating how both mechanisms of civic responsibility and crisis adaption influence volunteering during crises.