Forms of Group Involvement: Alternatives to the Standard Question

Deciding whether Americans have become decreasingly involved in group life entails a methodological issue: Does the standard question about the associations to which respondents belong, asked for decades by the General Social Survey (GSS) and many others, miss newer and more diverse forms of group involvement? Following on Paxton and Rap, we mine a recent panel survey, UCNets, that provides several different means for allowing respondents to describe their group involvement. We observe more and much more varied kinds of group involvement than those elicited by the last GSS administration of the standard question in 2004. (Analyses in the Supplement of a few additional surveys confirm this diversity.) These results lead to suggestions for how to better measure involvement in groups, in particular being more sensitive to many axes of difference in the general population. The results have implications for the larger debate as well.