Data to Support Scholarship on Nonprofit Organizations

Abstract

This two-part special issue of American Behavioral Scientist (that is, this volume and the one that will follow it in July 2002) emerged from the work of the Social Science Research Council's Committee on Research on Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector. The purpose of the committee is to help research on philanthropy and the nonprofit sector to achieve greater visibility, greater coherence, intellectual momentum, and intellectual direction. A central part of this fieldbuilding initiative is to promote the development of intellectual and material resources for studying philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. Toward this end, the committee decided early in its work to examine the quality and availability of data on nonprofit organizations and philanthropy by commissioning the essays included in this volume.

Civic Service Worldwide: Defining a Field, Building a Knowledge Base

“…The sector represents the arena of organized civic action where important public goods and services may be produced (McCarthy et al, 1992;Salamon, Hems, & Chinnock, 2000). There is much to be studied with regard to the sector's role and status in society, as well as its effectiveness and efficiency (Dimaggio, Weiss, & Clotfelter, 2002;Hodgkinson, 1990;Jackson-Elmoore & Hula, 2001;Salamon, 1994). Contours and attributes continue to be defined and debated, but in large measure, the nonprofit and voluntary sector has been institutionalized as a field (Hodgkinson & Painter, 2003).…”

Developing a Research Agenda on Civic Service

“…As such, CSD's survey was an initial search, and the authors did not pretend that the data were complete (McBride et al, 2003). Scholarly attention to these definitional challenges is critical, for good social science research needs good databases with time (DiMaggio, Weiss, & Clotfelter, 2002;Hodgkinson & Painter, 2003).…”

“…Recently, there have been assessments of research about the nonprofit sector nationally and internationally (DiMaggio et al, 2002;Hodgkinson & Painter, 2003;Nonprofit Sector Research Fund, 2002). These studies assessed the state of research on the nonprofit sector across more than 2 decades of scholarly effort both in the United States and globally.…”

“…Second, recent assessments of nonprofit research argue that definitions of terms related to data need to be usable across a number of social science disciplines (DiMaggio et al, 2002). Most of the authors in this volume agree that a clear set of definitions of civic service, citizen service, and national service need to be developed.…”

Toward a Global Research Agenda on Civic Service: Editors’ Introduction to This Special Issue

“…We hope this special issue will begin to build an empirical foundation for studying civic service worldwide. Eventually, this emerging field of study may lead to systematic data sets (Dimaggio, Weiss, & Clotfelter, 2002) and to comparative analyses. That is our long-term goal.…”