FRM 14-5
12/11
ABSTRACT
Better citizens? The relationship between homeownership and religious and political
voluntarism in the United States
Prepared by: Gina Peek
Design, Housing & Merchandising
443 HS
Gina.peek@okstate.edu
References
Cohen, N. E. (1960). Citizen particpation the backbone of democracy. In N. E. Cohen (Ed.), The citizen
volunteer: His responsibility, role, and opportunity in modern society. New York: Harper &
Brothers.
Dietz, R. D., & Haurin, D. R. (2003). The social and private micro-level consequences of
homeownership. Journal of Urban Economics, 54(3), 401-450.
Duncan, O. D. (1972). Unmeasured variables in linear models for panel analysis. Sociological
Methodology, 4, 36-82.
University of Michigan. (2003a). Panel Study of Income Dynamics Codebook Retrieved August 1, 2009,
from https://simba.isr.umich.edu/cb.aspx?vList=ER23554
University of Michigan. (2003b). Panel Study of Income Dynamics Codebook Retrieved August 1, 2009,
from https://simba.isr.umich.edu/cb.aspx?vList=ER23646
Implications for Cooperative Extension:
The implication of this study is that
individual community participation as
measured by religious and political
voluntarism is not stifled by tenure
decisions. Given this dataset and the
techniques used here, the assumption that
homeowners are better citizens resulting
from increased religious and political
voluntarism is unfounded.
Issue
Historically, U.S. policies intending to increase
homeownership have been successful. Have
these dollars been effectively spent with respect
to expected outcomes, including citizenship?
Citizenship is commonly measured as time and
effort spent on humanitarianism (Cohen, 1960).
Religious and political activities are common
voluntarism venues.
What
is
the
relationship
between
homeownership and citizenship, as measured by
religious and political voluntarism? This study
defines religious voluntarism is primarily
defined by how often respondent volunteered at
or through church, synagogue, or mosque, such
as serving on a committee, assisting in worship,
teaching, or helping others through programs
organized by place of worship (University of
Michigan, 2003a). Political voluntarism is
defined by how often respondent volunteered
through organizations to bring about social
change, such as civic or community action,
working for a political party or advocacy group
(University of Michigan, 2003b). Empirical
literature reveals modest to tenuous relationships
between homeownership and religious and
political voluntarism (Dietz & Haurin, 2003).
Tenure is a matter of choice. Use of a choice
variable as a key independent variable in
estimations leads to omitted variable bias. With
this in mind, this study uses before and after
comparisons with two waves of Panel Study of
Income Dynamics (PSID) data. The expectation
is that estimating the relationship between
homeownership and religious and political
voluntarism may be less clouded by omitted
time invariant variables (Duncan, 1972).
Weaknesses of the study include limited time
span of data, and certain weaknesses in
variables.
This study finds very little evidence of
statistically significant relationships between
homeownership and citizenship as measured by
religious and political voluntarism given data at
hand, variables used, and estimations based on
before-and-after comparisons. Future research
may include monitoring PSID for future
voluntarism variables. Alternatively, other
datasets such as the U.S. Census Bureau’s
Current Population Study (CPS), titled
Volunteering in the U.S. may be used to verify
results.