The Distribution of Giving in Six Surveys

Abstract

Despite widespread interest in philanthropy across social science disciplines and among policy-makers and practitioners it was not until the late 1980s that data on individual giving began to be regularly collected. Since that time several different surveys have been fielded, but these have produced very different measurements of the percentage of households making gifts and the amounts of those gifts. This paper examines six major household surveys of giving and attempts to trace these differences in measurement to underlying differences in survey methodology.