Special Seminar: Empirical Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action

SW829, Section 001

Nonprofit organizations play an increasingly important role in the provision of health, educational, and social services, cultural development, and the promotion of advocacy, civil rights, and civil society, in the U.S. and abroad. They also provide fascinating examples of mission-driven organizations that engender theoretical and empirical questions of interest to students of organizations coming from various disciplines. However, a well-developed empirical literature on such organizations and the dynamics and personnel within them is only now starting to emerge.

This course seeks to enhance graduate student interest, expertise, and scholarly productivity in empirical nonprofit research. It will expose them to:(1) current research via sessions with leading scholars in the field brought especially to campus, as well as their own reading of pertinent scholarly literature, and (2) new research opportunities utilizing existing data resources. Such datasets will include various large-scale U.S. social surveys that include relevant NOVA variables not analyzed by past investigators. (Most of these datasets are archived at the Institute for Social Research's Inter-University Consortium on Political and Social Research), and newly available computerized databases from such sources as the U.S. Internal Revenue Service's longitudinal information on tax-exempt entities, and other datasets examining the nonprofit sector around the world.

Ultimately, the course seeks to develop interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration among students and faculty from different academic units who share a mutual interest in some aspect of nonprofit organizations and voluntary action, and to encourage new research initiatives and collaborations.