Do Mormons Volunteer?
Data From Americorp and USAFacts
Introduction
Today, I don’t have any graphs I personally created but I wanted to share a few charts I found interesting in a newsletter called USAFacts. The former CEO of Microsoft heads this with the goal of analyzing of the vastness of freely available government data. Each week, they send a newsletter sharing a few charts about government data they investigated the week prior.
For one of their newsletters last month, they shared a series of charts about volunteering in the US and I found them relevant to Mormon Metrics. So, let’s look at these charts below.
Charts
The data specifically comes from a Biannual survey from AmeriCorps and the Census Bureau. Unfortunately, we do not have a religion question to look at in this survey, so there are no Mormon-specific breaks, but we can always look at Utah (where nearly 64% of the population is on church records) to guide us in understanding Mormon behavior. I attached a breakdown of Latter-Day Saints by state below if interested:
Our first chart gives you a sense of how many self-report volunteering formally and informally. As you can see, Americans volunteer informally at nearly twice the rate as they volunteer formally. In the grey text beneath the chart, the authors give more information for how formal and informal volunteering are defined.
Looking at a state-by-state breakdown, Utah is #1 with ~47% saying they volunteer formally through organizations. The northwest/midwest United States shows strong volunteering numbers and a lot of Mormons live in some of these areas.
For the chart above, I’d be curious how many Mormons consider the volunteering at church as volunteering through an organization. In my mind, I would say volunteering at a church function is volunteering through an organization, but perhaps some would say that formal volunteering is meant only for specifically volunteering (non-religious) organizations.
Looking at informal helping, Utah again ranks #1 in informal helping. 68% say they help their neighbors in running free errands, offering free childcare, etc.
We see strong self-reports of informal volunteering in the northwest.
From this data, I’d say Mormons are more likely to self-report volunteering than the average person. Not only is the state with the most Mormons (Utah) the #1 state in both formal and informal volunteering, but other states with high percentages of Mormons also show strong volunteering numbers. To further support this claim, we should observe data specifically about Mormons instead of state aggregates and look at memberships records of local charities, but from a high level I think my claim is reasonable.
Here are a few other facts about the US population and volunteering courtesy of USAFacts:
Women were more likely to volunteer formally than men (30.9% vs 25.6%), but they volunteered informally at the same rate.
Higher education levels were more likely to volunteer formally and informally.
GenXers were the most likely to volunteer formally and Boomers were the most likely to volunteer informally.
Let me know what you think in the comments. See you next week!