History Commons^™

Religion And Helping Others: The Role Of Values, Ideas, And Language, Christopher Einolf

Christopher J Einolf

This study used life narrative interview data from the Midlife in the United States (MIDUS) study to examine how religious values, ideas, and language motivate prosocial behaviors. Open coding of eighty-eight in-depth interviews revealed six themes: defining morality in religious terms, considering religion an important aspect of one’s identity, feeling that one’s life involves carrying out God’s mission, making an increased commitment to religion over time, drawing an explicit connection between religion and helping others, and, for Christian respondents, finding inspiration for helping in Jesus’ teaching, example, and sacrifice. Using ratings from independent coders, statistically significant relationships were found between …

Daily Spiritual Experiences And Prosocial Behavior, Christopher J. Einolf

Christopher J Einolf

This paper examines how the Daily Spiritual Experiences Scale (DSES) relates to range of prosocial behaviors, using a large, nationally representative U.S. data set. It finds that daily spiritual experiences are a statistically and substantively significant predictor of volunteering, charitable giving, and helping individuals one knows personally. Daily spiritual experiences better predict helping to distant others than to friends and family, indicating that they may motivate helping by fostering an extensive definition of one’s moral community. The relationship between the DSES and helping is not moderated by sympathy and is robust to the inclusion of most religiosity measures. However, the …

Who Volunteers? Constructing A Hybrid Theory, Susan M. Chambre, Christopher J. Einolf

Christopher J Einolf

This paper is an effort to initiate the development of a hybrid theory of volunteering. It describes three major theoretical perspectives: sociological theories which stress the importance of social context, social integration and social networks; prosocial and value orientations which emphasize the impact of individuals’ attitudes and beliefs regarding the importance of altruistic behavior and a sense of social responsibility; and resource theories that focus on the human capital and economic factors which both allow individuals to volunteer in meaningful ways and make them attractive to organizations.

Using the Midlife in the United States dataset, we operationalized the three theories …

The Timing Of Generative Concern: Evidence From A Longitudinal Survey, Christopher J. Einolf

Christopher J Einolf

Longitudinal data taken at a ten year interval from a large, nationally representative sample were used to examine whether generative concern, as measured by a reduced form of the Loyola Generativity Scale (LGS), changed through the life course. Men aged 25-30 in 1995 scored significantly higher on the LGS in 2005 (p < .05), and women aged 41-50 and 61-74 in 1995 experienced slight but statistically significant (p < .05) decreases. With these exceptions, mean levels of generative concern remained constant, suggesting that generative concern may be a stable personality trait, not associated with a particular life stage.