Passions, People and Appreciation: Making Volunteering Work for Young People 

Table 8 shows the percentages of people with certain characteristics who did various forms of volunteer work in 2001 when they were about 21 years old. The wording of the interview questions is provided in Table 3. Comparison of the results in Tables 5 and 8 require care because different questions were asked in the 2000 and the 2001 interviews. In 2000 the question about volunteer were asked about having ever participated in volunteer work while in 2001 the question was restricted to participation in the last year. Importantly, the prompts provided to panel members in 2001 were not the same as those provided in 2000.

Tables A6 and A7 in Supplementary Tables show the corresponding results separately for young men and women. The detailed types of volunteer work provided unprompted by respondents and included under Other in Table 8 are shown in Table A8. Notes to Tables, provides additional details about Table 8.

The results show that:

• Young women (50.4%) were more likely to engage in volunteer activities than were young men (41.6%). The pattern of higher female participation was consistent across most of the categories identified in Tables 8 and A8 except for sporting activities and contributions to the CFA and other emergency services.
• Higher socioeconomic background is associated with higher levels of work as a volunteer — participation in the high-est socioeconomic background category was 52.5% compared with 41.5% on the lowest category. This pattern was reasonably consistent across all categories of volunteer work except for child care and home help for which there was no relationship with socioeconomic status. Separate analyses of young men and women (Tables A6 and A7) showed similar results, although for young men the relationship between socioeconomic and voluntary sports and environmental activities was less clear.
• Young people from migrant backgrounds are less likely to participate in volunteer work and those from non-English-speaking backgrounds are least likely of all. The variation in participation in volunteer work across categories reflecting ethnic background, however, is relatively small and not always consistent.
  
  Young people born in non-English- speaking countries (40.8%) are less likely to do volunteer work than either young people born in English-speaking countries (45.9%) or in Australia (46.6%) – although this pattern was almost entirely due to differences in levels of participation among young men.
  
  Young people whose parents were both born in Australia are more likely to participate in voluntary activities (48.4%) than are other young people. There is little difference among the other categories, although young people with one parent born in Australia (45.4%) are somewhat more likely to participate in voluntary activities than those whose parents were both born outside Australia (38.1% and 40.3%). In this case, however, the pattern was stronger for young women than young men.
  
  There was, however, little difference in overall levels of volunteer labour for young people from homes in which English is rarely spoken and from homes in which it was almost always spoken – the lower level of participation was among young people from homes in which English was sometimes spoken.
  
  The overall higher levels of volunteering among young people whose parents were both born in Australia result from markedly higher levels of engagement in environmental and sports-related activities, child care, home help and other activities. Church-related volunteer work was somewhat higher for young people whose parents were both born in non-English speaking countries.
• The difference in the overall incidence of volunteer work between Indigenous (53.0%) and non-Indigenous youth (46.0%) was not statistically significant (p>0.05), but Indigenous youth were more likely than non-Indigenous youth to engage in sports-related activities, voluntary church work and child care.
• The difference in the overall incidence of volunteer work between young people with a disability (49.8%) and without a disability (45.8%) was not statistically significant (p>0.05), although young people with a disability were more likely to engage in fundraising and home help.
• Young people from rural areas (52.3%) are more likely to engage in volunteer work than are young people from partly rural areas (48.0%) or urban areas (47.3%). The pattern was fairly consistent across the various types of volunteer work except for sports and (especially) church-related activities. The rural-urban differences were markedly stronger for young men than for young women.
• Students who were in non-government schools (Independent, 51.3% and Catholic, 49.3%) are more likely to have engaged in volunteer work in the last year than students who were in government schools (44.3%). For the independent school category, church-related activities show the strongest differences. The pattern is fairly consistent across types of voluntary activities except for sports and home help for which young people from Catholic schools report higher levels of engagement.
• Higher levels of literacy and numeracy are associated with higher levels of participation in volunteer work by young Australians. At the upper-end of the distribution, the relationship is driven by volunteer work associated with church attendance. Young people with literacy and numeracy levels in the middle and upper-middle of the range have slightly higher levels of participation in voluntary activities. Those in the lowest quintile usually have among the lowest levels of participation for each of the various types of voluntary activity. The pattern is somewhat stronger for young women than for young men.
• Young people with a more positive self-concept are more likely to be volunteers than are young people with a less positive self-concept – 51.8% of the highest category compared with 41.1% of the lowest category. This pattern was fairly consistent for all categories of voluntary activities (except for church-related volunteering) and for young men and women separately.
• Young people who completed Year 12 (47.8%) are more likely to have volunteered in the preceding year than are young people who left school in Year 11 (41.0%) or in Years 9 or 10 (36.1%). Participation in home help, and church-related activities do not follow this general pattern. The relationship was stronger for young men than for young women.
• Young persons in part-time work (50.3%) are more likely to participate in volunteer work than either people in no work (45.1%) or people in full-time work (42.9%). The pattern was similar for men and women considered separately and for most of the different types of volunteer work identified in Table 8.