Denn wir wissen nicht, was sie tun : eine Analyse der Tätigkeiten freiwillig Engagierter in Deutschland auf Basis des Freiwilligensurveys 2014

In Germany, volunteering takes place in a broad range of fields and activities. But little is known about the activity profile of the volunteers and their quantitative distribution. This paper thus focuses on capturing and quantifying the breadth and depth of profiles of volunteer activity. For this purpose, we employ representative survey data from the German Survey on Volunteering (Deutscher Freiwilligensurvey, FWS 2014). The focus is on the analysis of 12,333 answers gathered from three open questions, containing detailed task descriptions of volunteers. Using content analysis, we examined, categorized and coded information, thereby enabling detailed statistical analyses of the fields of activities. Results of the analyses show that in addition to usual activities (e.g., caregivers; accident rescuer/firefighters; sports trainers; parents councils; refugee aids; lay judges), a hodgepodge of atypical activities exist. These can include, for example, groundskeeper in the allotment garden club, route guide in the motorcycle club, organizer of social evenings and helpers at festivals of all kinds. It also becomes clear that a large proportion of volunteers carry out non-sectoral activities (secondary ancillary activities, administrative tasks or management functions). In many areas of volunteering, these activities account for more than 50 percent of total activity. The analyses also demonstrate that volunteering in Germany is socially unevenly distributed. More highly edu- cated people not only volunteer more frequently, but also increasingly engage in activities through which sym- bolic capital (status, prestige) or social influence can be gained. Further, the study reveals significant differences between the sexes: on the one hand with regard to stereotypical role models (women are more likely to care for older people or engage as parents council, while men engage as coaches in sports or as firemen); on the other hand, women are significantly underrepresented in positions that result in increased status or influence. Overall, it becomes obvious that the questionnaire of the FWS (2014) covers a wide range of activities, but results in an overestimation of commitment in the narrower sense to the concept of civic engagement (cf. German Bun- destag 2002). It is therefore recommended to revise the approach to assessing volunteerism in future studies and to link it more closely to the actual fulfilment of certain criteria.