• Volunteering covers three main domains of activity – donated work for an organisation; informal work for other individuals or the community in general; and adult care.
• British men and women volunteered in roughly equal proportions in the 1970s, but women volunteer at a higher rate than men (though men tend to commit equal and possibly slightly higher time to volunteering than women when they do decide to volunteer).
• The British are less likely to volunteer at younger ages, and more likely to volunteer and to spend more time volunteering as they approach and in the years immediately after retirement.
• Voluntary activity in the United Kingdom falls in the middle range of volunteering in industrialised countries. People in many countries do less, but in some countries, including the USA and Turkey, people undertake considerably more voluntary activity.
• Voluntary behaviour in the UK has become more fragmented over the day with time.
• Over 40% of voluntary activity takes place at the same time as other activities. Diaries best collect these simultaneous activities that include volunteering.
• The Harmonised European Time Use Surveys design of diary, which enables people to complete activities in their own words, better collects data on the range of voluntary activities, particularly informal volunteering.
• Surveys need to collect large samples to collect diaries on sufficient numbers of days when people volunteer to assess the total volume and patterns of voluntary activity.
• Diaries show how people schedule voluntary activity into their other daily routines. Estimating the capacity of a society to take up more voluntary activity requires knowledge of people’s capacity to multi-task and the shift schedules. Diaries reveal what people do on days when they volunteer, but do not indicate the total number of people who might volunteer over the longer term. Additional survey questions or a one month volunteering schedule attached to a time diary survey could reveal this additional detail.
• While a wealth of time-use surveys permit tracking of behaviour trends in the UK from 1961 through 2005, the best historical survey informing voluntary activity was collected in 2000-01.
• Time diaries offer particular value for money. Diaries have higher administration costs than questionnaire surveys, but daily activity schedules inform a wide range of policy areas, including transport, physical activity, energy and resource use, total economic activity (paid and unpaid), work-life balance, parenting, eating and drinking behaviours, and quality of life. One time-use survey can address more areas than comparable funding on a series of questionnaire surveys.
