Social Science Research Council

Although the study of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector is flourishing, these sectors continue to occupy an uneasy position within the social sciences. The expansion of nonprofit studies as a field has not been accompanied by a comparable effort to assess how best to make use of existing and newly developed data resources. The upsurge of interest in civil society, social capital, and civic engagement, for example, has spurred the collection of significant new data resources on aspects of civil society, yet the participation of various disciplines in research utilizing these data is uneven. Similarly, large-scale data sets collected for a specific purpose may have alternative uses, but researchers have been slow to exploit them to address problems beyond those for which they were originally created. In addition, improvements in the accessibility and reliability of exisiting large-scale data sets, including those compiled by federal agencies such as the IRS, open up research opportunities that deserve broader attention.

To improve the state of data resources in the study of philanthropy and the nonprofit sector, the Program on Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector organized several projects to assess gaps in data resources, disseminate information about such resources, evaluate where research opportunities exist to exploit available data, and establish where new kinds of data are needed. These activities were designed to begin developing a map of where new research opportunities lie, how they are organized, and how they can be further exploited at a time in the development of the field when such guidance can be particularly useful in generating new research opportunities and improving the quality of existing research.

To advance these aims, in 2001 the committee commissioned a set of 30-40 page essays from scholars with expertise in areas that have been most influential in shaping research agendas in the field of philanthropy and nonprofit studies. These authors participated in a one day conference in October 2001 held in Washington, DC and also in a subsequent panel at the annual meeting of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA) held in Miami, FL in November 2001. These essays resulted in the publication of a special issue of the journal American Behavioral Scientist in 2002. The issue provides a state-of-the-art evaluation of data resources and research opportunities in philanthropy and the nonprofit sector. Click here to see the Table of Contents from the ABS special issue.