Citizen contribution to local public services - Part 4

John, Peter (2018). Citizen contribution to local public services - Part 4. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Archive. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-852200

Citizen contributions to public services are regarded as increasingly important by researchers and policy-makers. These include volunteering to make communities better places. A core idea in recent thinking in behavioural economics and the study of collective action is that the way information is presented to citizens matters to their willingness to donate their time. This can include who makes the request, what information there is about what other people do, and what feedback people get about their volunteering and the activities of others.

The research examined whether recommendations from prominent people, such as those in the community sector and politicians, could help promote civic action. The research also examined the effect of providing feedback about other people's time contributions. The researchers sought to identify whether varying the form of feedback to citizens matters, and used randomized controlled trials to investigate their effects on citizens' contributions to volunteering.

Data description (abstract)

This dataset relates to the ESRC Citizen Contribution to Local Public Services project. It is the fourth of four datasets created for this project. The project sought to identify how social information could influence volunteering levels in different groups, using four different field experiments. This dataset contains information from the fourth field experiment which examined one form of social information - i.e. endorsement - on a group of residents of a housing association. The other datasets in the project (1,2,3) examine other forms of social information with different groups of people.

The datatset contains information relating to a field experiment designed to measure the effect of email endorsements on citizens' proclivity to donate their time for voluntary causes, including a citizen social science project. The citizens were residents of a large Housing Association in the North of England. Participants were randomly assigned to receive an endorsement about the value of citizen science from either a fellow citizen, a prominent scientist, or received a control email with no endorsement.

Variables collected include age, sex, ethnicity, housing benefit status, volunteering history, number of hours volunteered typically over month, and a variety of volunteering outcome measures including hours volunteered in the 7 week period following receipt of the email, type of volunteering participant registered an interest in, and whether they clicked through to a website to find out more, actually registered for a volunteering opportunity and actually volunteered for one of the projects on offer.

Data were collected using an online survey emailed to participants (to measure volunteering outcomes) as well as directly from the Housing Association.

Data creators: