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

The results in Table 5 show whether or not people have done various forms of volunteer work by the time they are about 20 years old. The wording of the interview questions is provided in Table 2. The percentage of people who have done each of the listed forms of volunteer work is shown for categories of their various personal, family and educational characteristics. Tables A1 and A2 (see 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 5 are shown in Table A3.

• Young women (57.7%) are more likely than young men (46.9%) to have engaged in volunteer work – a difference that is relatively large in the context of this report. The difference between young men and women is repeated across most of the categories of volunteer work, with two major exceptions. Young men are more likely to have engaged in volunteer work in sport and with the Country Fire Authority (CFA) or other emergency services.
• Young Australians from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to have participated in volunteer work than young people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds – 59.7% of the highest socioeconomic category compared with 47.2% from the lowest socioeconomic category. The difference is due to engagement in specific areas of voluntary activity – with church and youth work, home help, sport, fundraising and other unspecified activity. Participation in formal community activities such as Meals on Wheels, St John's Ambulance, Lifeline or Youthline and reading for the blind is unrelated to socioeconomic background. Voluntary child care, however, is more likely to be provided by young (presumably female) persons from lower socioeconomic status.

See Notes to Tables

• Young people from non-English-speaking backgrounds are less likely than are other young people to have participated in volunteer work. The country of birth of the young person is not as important as the country of birth of their parents. If both their parents had been born in a mainly non-English-speaking country, a young person is less likely to have participated in volunteer work (45.5%) than if both had been born in Australia (54.8%). Young people from families in which English is rarely spoken at home are among those least likely (39.3%) to have participated in volunteer work. Engagement in volunteer work associated with non-English-speaking background is lowest for the more formal programs of community work such as Meals on Wheels, St John’s Ambulance, Lifeline and the CFA and particularly low for sports-related activities. Participation in church-based voluntary activities, however, is marginally higher for young people whose parents were both born in non-English-speaking countries (17.1%) than for young people whose parents were both born in Australia (15.0%).
• Young Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders are more likely to have participated in volunteer work (65.5%) than are other young people (52.1%). The higher level of participation in volunteer work of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth is consistent across almost all the categories of volunteer labour identified in Table 5, even though few of the differences are statistically significant (p<0.05) because of the relatively small number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the survey. The differences are somewhat greater for men than for women (Tables A1 and A2).
• Young people with a disability are more likely to have participated in volunteer work (60.6%) than are young people without a disability (51.7%). The difference is due to often only slightly higher levels of participation in each of the types of volunteer work identified in Table 5.
• Young people who lived in rural areas when they were in Year 9 are more likely to have participated in volunteer work than are young people in urban areas. The differences, however, are not large – 51.0% for urban areas, 53.3% for partly rural areas, and 57.4% for rural areas. Engagement across the various forms of community work partly reflects differences in opportunities in rural and urban areas. The higher levels of participation in rural areas overall are largely due to higher levels of volunteer work in sport, child care and emergency services such as the CFA.
• Attendance at a non-government school is associated with a higher likelihood of ever-having participated in community volunteer work (61.3% for Independent schools and 59.4% for Catholic schools) than attendance at a government school (48.8%). Young people who attended Catholic schools were more likely to have participated in formal programs such as Meals on Wheels, St John’s Ambulance or Lifeline while students at Independent schools were more likely to have participated in church-related activities.
• Higher levels of literacy and numeracy are associated with a higher likelihood of participation in volunteer work – 56.0% of young people in the top one fifth of literacy and numeracy achievement had participated in volunteer work by age 20 compared with 46.2% of those in the bottom one-fifth. The pattern was strongest for church-related activities, sport and fund-raising. For voluntary childcare, the pattern was reversed–young people with lower levels of literacy and numeracy were more likely to have provided child care.
• Young people with a more positive self-concept were more likely to have done various kinds of community volunteer work (56.7%) than young people with a less positive self-concept (48.5%). Although there was no clear pattern for several of the types of voluntary activity listed in Table 5, different levels of involvement in church and sports-based activities and in child care contribute to the overall relationship. The relationship is more marked for young men than for young women (Tables A1 and A2). Although for men, church-related activities varied little across categories of self-concept, there were large differences for sport and child care and more modest differences for home help and unclassified activities. For women, however, the positive relationship between self-concept and volunteer work was largely restricted to church and sports-based activities and child care.
• Australians who completed Year 12 were more likely to have participated in volunteer work by age 20 (54.7%) than were those who completed Year 11 (44.1%) or Year 9 or 10 (41.8%). This relationship largely reflects corresponding patterns for church and sports-based volunteer work as well as voluntary child care and raising funds for charity.
• Young people in full-time study and part-time work in 2000 (59.3%) and in part-time study only (58.4%) were more likely to have ever participated in voluntary activity than young people either in full-time work only (46.5%) or who were neither working or studying (47.1%).