The article “Who Gives What to Charity? Characteristics Affecting Donation Behavior” written by  Yu-Kang Lee and Chun-Tuan Chang from the National Sun Yet-sen University in Taiwan, is a very in depth study of exactly what they state in the title who gives what to charity. Their researching topic was streamlined by the concept that giving to charity appears in two forms time and money resulting in the question “can donors and nondonors be distinguished using demographic, socioeconomic, and psycho-graphic variables”. This is one of the easier research studies to determine what kind of data they need to answer their question which is self-identities or demographic data. Even their data gathering method is plainly explained even if you just read the abstract the data gathering method was a large-scale telephone survey done in Taiwan. As for the analysis that was something you had to read past the first two pages to get at but it isn’t really hidden amongst scientific jargon like many other research studies like to do to people trying to figure out how they performed their research. The analysis method was a qualitative one using transcripts from recordings of the telephone surveys. This piece was great when I first found when I was also deciding to shift my research project from a pollution based study to a donation study. However it feel into that category of being of a similar design just on a different topic. Those who are interested in volunteer work would find this very interesting as it is essentially a study that can be used to determine if people you know are more or less willing to donate either their money or time to help a charity or organization you happen to be working with. So I think this a great piece almost simply of the fact that it is still professional but doesn’t add in extensive amounts of scientific language to bog down report seeing as they already had a lot to cover as well as adding a future research section in case you wanted to help expand on it.

Link to article: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Y_K_Lee/publication/233603047_Who_Gives_What_to_Charity_Characteristics_Affecting_Donation_Behaviour/links/543b704d0cf2d6698be2fc9d.pdf

The field of sociology has quite the amount of subsections where people can just dedicate their time and effort into studying. The article “Donation Behavior toward In-Groups and Out-Groups: The Role of Gender and Moral Identity” by Karen Page Winterich, Vikas Mittal, and William T. Ross JR. is one such study. The premise of this article is to investigate some important two social identities one being gender and the other being moral. From what is present in the title and abstract the research question for this study could be “Does gender and moral identity influence donation behaviors between in-groups and out-groups”. The type of data for this study is simply identities and reports of actions. These two data types are needed because without both of them they could never come to a conclusion. The data gathering method for each study was done via survey in various locations. After all the separate studies were finished a qualitative analysis was carried out over the aggregated survey data using cross tabs to see if there was any significance to their findings. Overall I think this is a really good piece just in terms of seeing how a multi-study research study should carried out. Besides that it goes to show that even just the topic of donations have a lot of studies that could done because this study just does gender and moral identities so it could easily be expanded to other identities like region, age, or race. What I think others might find interesting about this study is that when giving out surveys your actually able to control for biases naturally wording the questions of the survey differently.

Link to article:  http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.569.642&rep=rep1&type=pdf

The article “Does the government crowd-out private donations? New evidence from a sample of non-profit firms” published in the Journal of Public Economics 69. Is written by Abigail Payne  who is a professor in the Department of Economics from the University of Toronto. The research question in this piece is clearly stated i the the article “does the government crowd-out private donations?”.  This premise of the research starts back in the 1980’s when the Canadian government started to reduce the number of grants given to non-profit organizations. However since government grants and private donations are the only way non-profits are able to generate revenue with either or being a large component of the revenue suddenly being removed can cause a dramatic shift in how a non-profit markets themselves. The data needed to solver this kind of question is organizational data because each non-profit is going to handle donations in a way so you’d have to ask each organization to get access to the data of the donation and grant money. The gathering method behind this research is reports of actions, the specific action being money donated via individual or grants from the government. This is a very interesting piece because many of the other research studies I’ve looked at have all been based in Canada. So those who are interested in governmental impact on non-profits should look into this.

Link to Article: http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~jkbrueck/course%20readings/Econ%20272B%20readings/payne.pdf

The article “An Econometric Analysis of Donations for Environmental Conservation in Canada” written by Steven T. Yen, Peter C. Boxali, and Wiktor L. A is a piece that looks at how government policy can effect donations towards environmental issues. The question behind this research is “how does the reduction of government funding to environmental conservation programs effect individual/organizational interest?”. This question was asked in response to multiple provincial governments in Canada deciding to do budget reforms and at the time in 1997 environmental concern wasn’t big of a priority when first moving into the twenty-first century.  Which lead these researchers to gather and use empirical data in order answer their question. The method the used to measure the changes from individuals and organizations is called a “double-hurdle econometric model” to chart out their findings. As for how they obtained their findings was through organizational data. This was done by asking multiple donation centers and environmental organizations about the records concerning donations received after the policy change. The article itself is well done and a good resource for how different governmental funding plans can alter peoples willingness to donate or join environmental organizations. It is a little on the older side being produced during 1997 but is well done so it becomes a resource and a marker for the years covered by the study. What I think others would find interesting about this piece is that the involvement of government policy and donations in Canada, these two things would seem to be distinct from one another but are actually deeply interconnected.

www.jstor.org.books.redlands.edu/stable/40986946

In order to figure out a new trend you have to look at the other ways trends about your topic have been analyzed. Since my research question has to do with donations looking at articles that focus on what factors may determine what effects peoples willingness to donate. In the journal “The Canadian Journal of Economics” there is an article titled  “Economic determinants of individual charitable donations in Canada” written by  R. D. Hood, S. A. Martin and L. S. Osberg.  As the title of the article mentions the topic of this research is an in-depth study of the variables that effect individual charitable donations. Mainly the economic variables because one of the major more common ideologies about donating is that what constitutes as a “good” donation is seemingly a percentage of your total income. Which brings up many questions about the psychological, social, or economics aspects of donating,  but the question this research study decided to handle is “how would tax reforms effect charitable donations in Canada”. To answer this question the researchers gathered people’s opinions about donations and how tax reforms may or may not encourage more individual charitable donations. To define the general theories behind donating. And empirical data to make note on trends using qualitative analysis because in the end goal is to make predictions about how tax reforms will alter individual donations. Overall I think this a well done research study though it tackles something a little more abstract than the previous ones I’ve looked at. What I think others will find interesting about the this article is how in Canada taxes can play a big role in someones decision to make a donation whereas in the United States it’s most likely very different.

http://0-www.jstor.org.books.redlands.edu/stable/134296

This research proposal was written by Stacy Philpott  from the University of Toledo in the United States, Ohio. The purpose of this research is to bring new ideas and concepts to the table of ecological studies by introducing a more practical approach of studying agroecosystems. As stated in the proposal this will be done by studying twig nesting ants in a coffee field the reason behind using twig nesting ants as the focus organism is that they are relatively easy to manipulate and monitor compared to other congregating organisms. The main purpose for these studies to make the field of agroecology more accessible by explored the driving forces behind community assembly in tropical twig-nesting ant communities. Since this is a research proposal based around testing hypotheses  there are multiple research question that could used for this study, such as “examine changes in relative abundance of ants in years following a large-scale disturbance and correlate any observed changes with life history traits of individual species in the twig-nesting ant community”. To answer most of the research questions offered in this proposal one would need acts, behavior, or events as the data main type of data a couple other type of data that are helpful but not necessarily mandatory would be expert knowledge because the history of the twig-nesting ants helps in determining any significant changes to the twig-nesting ants behaviors. The method of analysis for the collected data would be a quantitative analysis due to monitoring nest size and how the other factors influence the total size of a colony or if those factors cause the colony to move or reduce its size. Overall this research proposal is well put together in part due to having a range of good research questions so different groups can potentially be interested in the research in some way or another. As well as the inclusion of well thought out explanation of the logical structure which at first I was confused by because the proposal in almost a two part proposal in the way of the research is suppose to open up the field of agroecology as well as being an study on twig-nesting ants. I think there is plenty of information on this research proposal that most of my classmates could find something interesting because it combines ecology and agriculture together so there is quite a bit variety in this proposal.

Link to proposal PDF: www.utoledo.edu/research/pdfs/Philpott-NSF-AntsAndAgroecosystem.pdf

The journal “International Advances in Economic Research”   contains the article  Charitable Donations: Evidence of Demand for Environmental Protection? by Debra K. Israel. This article  is an analyzing  the 2001 Giving and Volunteering in the United States survey in order to understand the connections between households and charitable donations to environmental organizations. Which gives way to the research question of how do factors such as levels of income, education, being female, home-ownership, and ability are relate to likelihood of charitable donations to environmental organizations. Since the reasons behind someone donating are many and varied the data type needed to answer the research question is survey data as it allows for collection from a large amount of people and questionnaires can cover enough of the factors to draw conclusions for the question. The analytical approached used in this article is stated as a sensitive analysis so it may fall under a type of analysis we do not cover in the course but can somewhat be compared to a descriptive analysis due to working with large amounts of data. I found this article to be very well done as the author during the analysis mentions that just because the data shows a specific trend doesn’t mean that it reflects why some households are more or less charitable since the information is being gathered from individuals. It is also very thorough as it also makes use of regression to see if there are any non-factors among the projected factors used in the research. One interesting thing I found in this article is that being female has no impact on the likelihood of donations but being Latino does slightly impact the likelihood of donations.

This article can found online in “International Advances in Economic Research” Issue 13 Vol 2 May 2007.

Link to article: http://0-web.b.ebscohost.com.books.redlands.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&sid=64ff7b4d-2728-48eb-a39a-a20c418f547e%40sessionmgr104&hid=129

The dead-zone in the Gulf of Mexico has been continually increasing in size in the journal Restoration Ecology, the journal of the society for ecological restoration this problem is being addressed. Many have blamed the agricultural industry for polluting the Mississippi river with nutrients mainly nitrogen. In the article Nitrogen farming: Harvesting a different crop written by Donald L. Hey is an analysis of nitrogen runoff and some proposals on how to reduce the amount of excess nitrogen. The topic of this article is what are some alternative ways to managing nitrogen runoff which transitioned into the question how can farming to be used to mitigate nitrogen runoff. In order to come up with the data necessary for this kind of study Hey used organizational data as well as expert knowledge. The reason these two types of data were used is because there quite a few organizations who have already documented the amount of nitrogen in the Mississippi river so instead of redoing all those test Hey used pre-existing data. The expert knowledge comes with Hey’s proposals to entice farmers to use the alternative methods he proposes this was likely done by interviewing farmers and asking in order to find ways to incentivise farmers to switch crops. After all the data was collected Hey used a Interval data analysis in order to show how the proposed crops will alleviate excess nitrogen around the Mississippi river. Overall this is a very informative article that clearly lays out the information which really shows the point of just how bad the runoff of nitrogen alone is not only the for Mississippi river but also for the Gulf of Mexico.

The way humans behave is quite peculiar sometimes you end up working your dream job you’ve always wanted but on the other hand you might have another job that somehow managed to interest you far beyond your dream job. This is only possible because of the concept organizational attraction which is a tactic used by employers and organization to generate interest when it comes to finding new employees to hire. In the article Narrow personality traits and organizational attraction: Evidence for the complementary hypothesis written by Kausel, Edgar E. and Slaughter, Jerel E. the authors try and answer what kind of complementary and supplementary recruiting strategies attracting an employers most preferred candidate. The Kausel and Slaughter went about this was by asking 220 participants to join in their research study, the participants were all job seekers and all they had to do was report on how interested or interesting a group of job advertisements were to them sent via email. The process in which Kausel and Slaughter acquired the shallow opinions of the participants was through repeated uses of questionnaires. I believe the way Kausel and Slaughter analysed their findings was through researcher-centered analysis because they are looking for patterns such as what traits attract more suitable job candidates or what strategies are most effective at making an organization more attractive. Overall I found this to be a well done research study the researchers even started with a set of possible categories the participants could fall into but had room for changes if necessary. They data collection method was not just used on time each participant answered up to 3 questionnaires giving a broader sense of what the participants feel about the job advertisements. For my fellow classmates I think the focus on certain traits like trust, assertiveness, and so on are very interesting.

Link to article, http://0-search.proquest.com.books.redlands.edu/docview/755396882/6C8EB073521844EDPQ/1?accountid=14729