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Toward Improvements in the Comparative Measurement of Volunteer Effort

To overcome the problems that have so far undercut efforts to gain a clear, crossnational understanding of the scope and impact of volunteering, we worked closely with the International Labour Organization to produce in 2011 a Manual on the Measurement of Volunteer Work (ILO Manual). The distinguishing features of this Manual are that it (1) offers an internationally accepted operational definition of volunteer work that allows unambiguous identification of activities in scope in a broad international context; and (2) connects the measurement of volunteer work to the statistical apparatus for measuring paid work, thus increasing the likelihood that volunteer work will be measured regularly.

The ILO approach to measuring volunteer work was developed by a group of international volunteer experts and national labor force statisticians to facilitate the assembly of reliable and cross-nationally comparable measures of volunteer work. To this end, the ILO Manual’s approach was designed to meet four criteria:

• Breadth, i.e., to encompass the broadest array of volunteer activity, including such activity done through organizations as well as such work done directly for individuals;
• Conceptual clarity, i.e., to allow unambiguous identification of activities that are in and out of scope;
• Objectivity, i.e., grounded in empirically observable and measurable features of human activity as opposed to unobservable ones (e.g., intentions or motivations); and
• Institutionalizability, i.e., utilizing techniques that can be feasibly integrated into existing statistical data systems so that reliable data can be assembled on a regular basis.

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Measurement of Volunteer Work: Agreements and Disagreements
When one establishes the reasons why Latin Americans appear to volunteer less than their counterparts in developed countries, many factors should be mentioned. Among these reasons, it is worthwhile to mention the instruments used to capture data (household surveys vs. omnibus surveys), the way the topic...
(Perspectives on Volunteering: Voices from the South)
Quality improvement and institutional performance measurement.
The MoH has established five indicator categories to measure the institutional performance of hospitals. Each indicator carries equal weight. These indicators largely target the structural quality of care and patient and provider satisfaction. The five categories include: (i) access to examination rooms,...
(Improving public services: international experiences in using evaluation tools to measure program performance)
Comparing the Results of the UCR Program, the NCVS, and Self-Report Measures
There are significant differences between the various crime measures. As just indicated in the previous section, while African Americans are more frequently processed by the criminal justice system, self-report surveys suggest that there is no actual difference in the amount of crime engaged in by whites...
(Crime and Intelligence Analysis: An Integrated Real-Time Approach)
Initial Measurement of External Radiation and Internal Radiation Doses of Volunteers
The dispatch period, working place, and distance from TEPCO's plant, air dose rate, and external radiation doses of KURRI volunteers are listed in Table 17.1. The external radiation dose shows the 24-h doses for each volunteer using a personal dosimeter. As shown in Table 17.1, the data of screening...
(Radiation Monitoring and Dose Estimation of the Fukushima Nuclear Accident)
Challenges to Measuring Volunteering
To be sure, measuring volunteer work is an extremely difficult task that faces multiple challenges. In the first place, even the definition of volunteering is unsettled, in part because the term carries different meanings, and different connotations, in different cultures and settings, and some of these...
(Perspectives on Volunteering: Voices from the South)
Defining and Measuring Volunteering
In the introduction to this book, we considered the definition of volunteering at length and adopted two standard definitions that we wanted all of the authors to use. This attempt did not succeed, as volunteering varies too much from country to country for any one standard definition to fit. The different...
(Perspectives on Volunteering: Voices from the South)
Measures to Improve Sleep Hygiene
Sleep restriction therapy entails limiting time in bed to consolidate actual time sleeping. The patient is counseled to reduce the amount of time in bed to correlate closely with actual time sleeping. The recommended sleep times are based on sleep logs kept for 2 weeks before sleep restriction therapy...
(Geriatric rehabilitation : from bedside to curbside)
Definition of Measurable Improvement (FIM)
The patient’s progress and functional improvement is measured with the FIM, which is a proprietary assessment scale, that assesses physical and cognitive disability. This scale focuses on the burden of care—that is, the level of disability indicating the burden of caring for them. Items are scored...
(Geriatric rehabilitation : from bedside to curbside)
Measurement and comparability
The measurement of the economic impacts of ICT investment at the aggregate level is relatively straightforward and has been outlined in detail in Colecchia and Schreyer (2001) and Schreyer et al. (2003). It is based on growth accounting, which involves the estimation of the productive capital...
(OECD guide to measuring the information society 2011.)