Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating, 2004 [Canada]: Giving File

The Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating is the latest iteration of a series of surveys that began with the National Survey of Giving, Volunteering and participating. It was conducted by Statistics Canada in 1997 as a supplement to the Labour Force Survey, and was repeated in the fall of 2000. In 2001, the federal government provided funding to establish a permanent survey program on charitable giving, volunteering and participating within Statistics Canada. The survey itself was renamed the Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating (CSGVP). The CSGVP was developed through a partnership of federal government departments and voluntary sector organizations. These include Canadian Heritage, Health Canada, Human Resources and Social Development Canada, Imagine Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada, Statistics Canada and Volunteer Canada. Because the 2004 CSGVP employs a different survey approach and because it uses a somewhat different questionnaire than did the previous surveys, it is not appropriate to compare results from the 2004 CSGVP with the two previous surveys. There are two data files for the 2004 Canada Survey of Giving, Volunteering and Participating (CSGVP): the main answer file (MAIN.TXT), and the giving file (GS.TXT). To link between the MAIN and GS Public Use Microdata Files use the variable PUMFID. This is the giving or charitable donation answer file. It contains one or more records for each person who made a financial donation: one record for each of up to 10 charitable organizations to which the respondent donated, over the 12 month reference period, in response to a particular solicitation method. For each of the 13 methods of solicitation itemized in the questionnaire, a donor may therefore have up to 10 records, each containing information regarding the type of organization, as well as the total value of all donations made to that organization in response to that method of solicitation. In cases where the respondent donated to more than 10 organizations in response to a given method of solicitation, the total value of all donations made to the remaining organizations is present on the 10th record as derived variable GS1D08.