Demand Networks and Informal Volunteering
Hjalmar Bang Carlsen, SODAS, and Jonas Toubøl, Department of Sociology have co-authored an article published by the British Journal of Sociology.
Why do people help others? Research on volunteering has mostly looked at the “supply side” – volunteers’ motivations, skills, and resources. In this article, Hjalmar Bang Carlsen and Jonas Toubøl turn the question around to the demand side: the need for help a person actually encounters. The authors develop the concept of the demand network – the perceived need for help among people in one’s personal network. Their claim is simple but overlooked: the more needs for support a person perceives around them, the more likely they are to help. Social ties are not only a source of resources we can draw on, but also a source of demands placed on us. One person’s support network is another’s demand network. The paper also asks why people don not all respond alike to the needs in their networks, pointing to two institutional factors; gender roles and altruistic values.
The study uses an original cross-sectional survey of the adult Danish population, collected by Statistics Denmark in April 2021 during the COVID-19 crisis from a random register-based sample; 1,551 people completed it (31%). Informal volunteering was measured through concrete tasks (childcare, shopping, information sharing, transport, donations, and more). The demand network was captured by asking how many friends, family, and acquaintances the respondent knew to be in need.
The findings support the core idea. There is a strong, robust link between the need a person perceives and whether they volunteered informally: each additional person seen to be in need raised the likelihood of helping by roughly 5 percentage points, in a near-linear pattern.
The two institutional factors are more nuanced. Women perceived somewhat more need than men, but not significantly so – yet they were more likely to act on the need they saw. A man aware of three people in need had about a 47% chance of volunteering; a comparable woman, about 61%. This gender effect was only weakly significant, so it is treated as tentative. Altruistic values worked the other way: people with stronger self-transcendence values perceived more need but were no more likely to act on it.
The broader message is to reconceptualise social ties not only as channels of resources but as sources of demand. This has stakes for community resilience: a central network position can be a resource, but in a crisis it can also become a burden, tipping into overload or burnout.