Charity and social redistribution: Quantitative and qualitative perspectives

Materials from research project including transcriptions of interviews and survey data; in-depth interviews with 41 individuals from different occupations, including public sector administrators, university lecturers, social care workers, home-keepers, mature students and retirees.
The semi-structured interviews consisted of two parts, lasting on average 2.25 hours. The first part asked the interviewees to recount their life history, describing the twists and turns in their lives, their personal goals and their everyday practices. In the second part, they recalled significant acts of giving and volunteering, describing their feelings and motivations. Every time interviewees mentioned emotions and morality, they were prompted to go on talking and to give illustrations. A picture emerged of how they have had to navigate their way through life, dovetailing and prioritising various moral concerns and commitments in an environment that they could not control. It is in this context that their charitable acts are understood and explained.<p>This project is part of a programme of research being undertaken by the Centre for Giving and Philanthropy (CGAP) that seeks to investigate quantitative and qualitative perspectives of charity and social redistribution. It is the second of two, University of Southampton based projects exploring charitable redistribution in the UK. The first project comprised the building of an extensive database of UK charities to enable quantitative analysis of charities within the UK. This project takes a qualitative perspective to examine and explore, at a local level, some of the emerging themes from subsequent quantitative analysis of the Project 1 database relating to the distribution of charitable resources. </p>