Volunteer Behavior among Asian American Groups in the United States

Volunteer Behavior among Asian American Groups in the United States

Richard A. Sundeen

Cristina Garcia

Volunteering is any activity of giving time freely for the benefit of another person, group, or cause.² The number of people and the hours volunteered in a country indicates the vitality of its civil society. It is estimated that 65.4 million American people volunteered at least once to an organization in 2005 and that, on average, people volunteered 50 hours annually.³ The total dollar value of volunteer time in 2005 reached $280 billion.⁴ At this scale, volunteers are important assets that provide immeasurable social and economic values to nonprofit organizations and communities. In such a context, understanding who is likely to volunteer, what factors promote the decision to volunteer, and for what kind of organizations people choose to volunteer is vital to the thriving of the nonprofit sector and the theoretical development of the field.

In the past few decades, the United States has become increasingly diverse in its race and ethnicity. Asian Americans are one of the fastest-growing, and certainly the most ethnically diverse, American racial groups. From 1990 to 2006, the Asian American population has increased by 90%, reaching 13 million which accounted for 4% of the total population.⁵ The U.S. Census divided Asian Americans into sixteen subgroups based on their countries of origin (Asian Indian, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and so on).⁶ Among the thirteen million Asian Americans, 80% were foreign-born or immigrants. For such a growing and diverse group, our understanding of their volunteer behavior is still very limited. More importantly, we have little knowledge of how acculturation of the Asian immigrants affects their likelihood of volunteering in the United States.

Prior research on volunteerism has used race/ethnicity as a predictor of volunteer behavior and has demonstrated different voluntary activities among African Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and Whites in the United States.⁷ For example, Sundeen et al. found that whites volunteer at a higher rate to formal organizations than the other racial/ethnic groups.⁸ Also, other studies have focused on volunteering by a separate group, such as African Americans.⁹ Very few, however, have studied Asian American volunteering,¹⁰ and even fewer have investigated the differences across various Asian American subgroups.¹¹ This cross-group focus is partly a consequence of the pan-Asian American notion, which emphasizes the integration and cultural similarities of Asian American populations.¹² Recently, however, scholars have increasingly realized the significance of differences in the language, history, cultural values, religious beliefs, and acculturation among Asian American groups,¹³ as well as the reasons for migrating, including political asylum, religious freedom, education, career advancement, and business.¹⁴ The diversity in their background and experiences will certainly affect their decisions to participate and contribute to communities in the United States. Therefore, studying the voluntary behavior of Asian American subgroups is necessary for us to better understand the role of such a diverse racial group in American civil society.

Of the few studies that examine the philanthropic and prosocial behavior of Asian American subgroups, several are qualitative, using interview and case study methods,¹⁵ while others are journalists' accounts that richly illustrate their benevolent practices, their rationales, and their challenges.¹⁶ However, there are significant limitations to these qualitative studies, including their small, non-random samples,¹⁷ a lack of systematic comparison across Asian subgroups, and, in some cases, a focus on philanthropic and charitable activities (rather than on volunteering).

In this study, we bridge the gap in the literature by exploring empirically the volunteer activities of Asian Americans, in general, and the differences in volunteering across three major Asian American ethnic groups: Asian Indians, Chinese, and Filipinos. We focus on volunteering to formal organizations, as formal volunteering is relevant to the development of the nonprofit sector and is captured by most...