Select Publications
The Evolution of the Nonprofit Research Field: An Emerging Scholar Perspective
Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly: Peter Schubert, Robert W. Ressler, Laurie E. Paarlberg, Silke Boenigk
This study takes an emerging scholar perspective to reflect critically on the evolution of the nonprofit research field, applying a mixed-methods design. Study 1 evaluated the evolution of nonprofit research through comparing the topics, theories, and methods in emerging nonprofit scholars’ dissertations (n = 3,023) to that of emerging scholars’ publications in nonprofit journals (n = 390). Study 2 examined through a survey of emerging nonprofit scholars (n = 141) how forces operating within the academic system influence scholars’ early career research. Results from Study 1 document a decreasing diversity in the body of scholarship from dissertations to journal articles and Study 2 highlights challenges experienced in an early career stage. The findings call for future reflection on the level of diversity, both in terms of research approaches and the composition of our scholarly community. Maintaining diversity will arguably be an important precondition to ensure continuous knowledge advancement in the field.
Connecting past to present: Examining different approaches to linking historical redlining to present day health inequities
PLOS ONE: Clemens Noelke, Michael Outrich, Mikyung Baek, Jason Reece, Theresa L. Osypuk, Nancy McArdle, Robert W. Ressler, Dolores Acevedo-Garcia
In the 1930’s, the Home Owner Loan Corporation (HOLC) drafted maps to quantify variation in real estate credit risk across US city neighborhoods. The letter grades and associated risk ratings assigned to neighborhoods discriminated against those with black, lower class, or immigrant residents and benefitted affluent white neighborhoods. An emerging literature has begun linking current individual and community health effects to government redlining, but each study faces the same measurement problem: HOLC graded area boundaries and neighborhood boundaries in present-day health datasets do not match. Previous studies have taken different approaches to classify present day neighborhoods (census tracts) in terms of historical HOLC grades. This study reviews these approaches, examines empirically how different classifications fare in terms of predictive validity, and derives a predictively optimal present-day neighborhood redlining classification for neighborhood and health research.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0267606
Nonprofits: A Public Policy Tool for the Promotion of Community Subjective Well-being
Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory: Robert W. Ressler, Pamela Paxton, Kristopher Velasco, Lilla Pivnick, Inbar Weiss, and Johannes Eichstaedt
Looking to supplement common economic indicators, politicians and policymakers are increasingly interested in how to measure and improve the subjective well-being of communities. Theories about nonprofit organizations suggest that they represent a potential policy-amenable lever to increase community subjective well-being. Using longitudinal cross-lagged panel models with IRS and Twitter data, this study explores whether communities with higher numbers of nonprofits per capita exhibit greater subjective well-being in the form of more expressions of positive emotion, engagement, and relationships. We find associations, robust to sample bias concerns, between most types of nonprofit organizations and decreases in negative emotions, negative sentiments about relationships, and disengagement. We also find an association between nonprofit presence and the proportion of words tweeted in a county that indicate engagement. These findings contribute to our theoretical understanding of why nonprofit organizations matter for community-level outcomes and how they should be considered an important public policy lever.
https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/muab010
Donations in social context
Nonprofit Management & Leadership: Robert W. Ressler, Pamela Paxton, and Kristopher Velasco
Many nonprofit organizations rely on donations to fund their programs, and a robust literature predicts donations in large‐scale quantitative studies. The focus, however, is almost exclusively on the financial characteristics of the organizations, leaving the social context underexplored. In this article, we theorize how ecological context, organizational identity, and social network ties can shape donations. We use the new Internal Revenue Service (IRS) release of e‐filed nonprofit reporting forms to consider 95,518 501(c)3 nonprofits around 2015. Using lagged regression models, we find that organizations within a more favorable ecological context, those that use appeals to religion, and organizations with more volunteers report more donations. Furthermore, stressing affiliation with a geographic location is associated with more donations only under certain ecological conditions. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these results for nonprofit organizations and social theories regarding what influences donations to organizations.
https://doi.org/10.1002/nml.21449
Does Use of Emotion Increase Donations and Volunteers for Nonprofits?
American Sociological Review: Pamela Paxton, Kristopher Velasco, and Robert W. Ressler
Winner of the Academy of Management Public and Nonprofit Division’s Best Article Award 2021
Nonprofits offer services to disadvantaged populations, mobilize collective action, and advocate for civil rights. Conducting this work requires significant resources, raising the question: how do nonprofits succeed in increasing donations and volunteers amid widespread competition for these resources? Much research treats nonprofits as cold, rational entities, focusing on overhead, the “price” of donations, and efficiency in programming. We argue that nonprofits attract donors and volunteers by connecting to their emotions. We use newly available administrative IRS 990 e-filer data to analyze 90,000 nonprofit missions from 2012 to 2016. Computational text analysis measures the positive or negative affect of each nonprofit’s mission statement. We then link the positive and negative sentiment expressed by nonprofits to their donations and volunteers. We differentiate between the institutional fields of nonprofits—for example, arts, education, social welfare—distinguishing nonprofits focused on social bonding from those focused on social problems. We find that expressed positive emotion is often associated with higher donations and volunteers, especially in bonding fields. But for some types of nonprofits, combining positive sentiment with negative sentiment in a mission statement is most effective in producing volunteers. Auxiliary analyses using experimental and longitudinal designs provide converging evidence that emotional language enhances charitable behavior. Understanding the role of emotion can help nonprofit organizations attract and engage volunteers and donors.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122420960104
What Village? Opportunities and Supports for Parental Involvement Outside of the Family Context
Children and Youth Services Review: Robert W. Ressler
Parental involvement research and practice has disproportionately focused on the characteristics of families that promote family-school partnerships. This study focuses instead on school and community characteristics that may elicit or support parental involvement for all families, but especially those from racial/ethnic minority groups. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort 2011 enhanced with data from the American Community Survey and the IRS, multilevel models reveal that educational organizations in the community are associated with higher levels of school-based parental involvement behaviors. This association varies across diverse racial/ethnic groups, such that the link between human service organizations and parental involvement is stronger for Latina/o families than for White and Black families.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.childyouth.2019.104575
Race/ethnicity, human capital, and the selection of young children into early childhood education
Social Science Research: Robert W. Ressler, Elizabeth Ackert, Arya Ansari, Robert Crosnoe
Mexican-origin families face complex ethnic and immigration-based barriers to enrollment in early childhood education programs. As such, reducing barriers to enrollment for this population requires a better understanding of how Mexican-origin families work with, against, or around both general and group-specific constraints on educational opportunities. Using the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort, this study tailored broad social theory to the experience of Mexican-origin families to examine associations between human capital considerations and early childhood education enrollment within this population. Results supported the hypothesis that human capital considerations would be associated with early childhood care and education and provide limited evidence for the expectation that this link would be stronger for Mexican-origin families.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2019.102364
Community contexts and utilization of early childhood care and education among Mexican-origin children
Early Childhood Research Quarterly: Elizabeth Ackert, Robert W. Ressler, Arya Ansari, and Robert Crosnoe
Children of Mexican origin are under-enrolled in early childhood education programs relative to Black and White children, which is problematic given the potential benefits of early childhood education. To better understand this under-enrollment in ways that can inform efforts to change it in the future, this study examined how utilization of early care and education programs varied among Mexican-origin families according to the community contexts where they lived. Integrating data on Mexican-origin children in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Birth Cohort (n = 1100) with community data from the U.S. Census Bureau, logistic regressions revealed that the odds of enrollment in early care and education programs among Mexican-origin children increased as the supply of childcare centers in their counties increased. Holding childcare center supply constant, their enrollment also increased as the percent of co-ethnic Latinos/as in the county increased, especially for children from the least acculturated Mexican-origin families. Overall, these results suggest that ethnic enclaves might link Mexican-origin families to early childhood care and education programs for their children and that this role might be most important for families least likely to be connected to U.S. institutions.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecresq.2018.09.008
Do National Service Programs Improve Subjective Well-Being in Communities?
The American Review of Public Administration: Kristopher Velasco, Pamela Paxton, Robert W. Ressler, Inbar Weiss, Lilla Pivnick
Since the creation of Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) in 1964 and AmeriCorps in 1993, a stated goal of national service programs has been to strengthen the overall health of communities across the United States. But whether national service programs have such community effects remains an open question. Using longitudinal cross-lagged panel and change-score models from 2005 to 2013, this study explores whether communities with national service programs exhibit greater subjective well-being. We use novel measures of subjective well-being derived from tweeted expressions of emotions, engagement, and relationships in 1,347 U.S. counties. Results show that national service programs improve subjective well-being primarily by mitigating threats to well-being and communities that exhibit more engagement are better able to attract national service programs. Although limited in size, these persistent effects are robust to multiple threats to inference and provide important new evidence on how national service improves communities in the United States.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0275074018814883
Revisiting Declines in Social Capital: Evidence from a New Measure
Social Indicators Research: Inbar Weiss, Pamela Paxton, Kristopher Velasco, Robert W. Ressler
In the late twentieth century, researchers began calling attention to declining social capital in America and the potential consequences of this trend for a healthy society. While researchers empirically assessed the decline in social capital from the mid-1900s onward, this line of research diminished when the major source of data, the General Social Survey, stopped fielding critical questions in 2004. We do not know, therefore, whether social capital, especially associational social capital, has declined, stabilized, or even increased in a twentyfirst century America. In this paper, we develop a new measure of associational social capital using a confirmatory factor analysis of six indicators from the Civic Engagement Supplement to the Current Population Survey for 2008–2011 and 2013. Our findings support previous research suggesting that associational social capital does not seem to be declining over time. However, we do find evidence of a nonlinear decrease in associating during the Great Recession years. Across the entire time period, though, membership in groups has not declined and there has been little practical change in the amount of time that individuals spend with neighbors. Our analysis of the variance of social capital also shows no general change in the national dispersion of social capital from 2008 to 2013. The paper advances the measurement of social capital and updates our understanding of its possible decline.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11205-018-1956-6
Maternal Employment, Community Contexts, and the Child‐Care Arrangements of Diverse Groups
Journal of Marriage and Family: Elizabeth Ackert, Robert W. Ressler, Arya Ansari, Robert Crosnoe
Integrating family and child data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Birth Cohort with contextual data from the census, this study examined associations among maternal employment, aspects of communities related to child‐care supply and demand, and the early care and education arrangements of 4 year olds in Mexican‐origin, Black, and White families. Children with employed mothers were more likely to be in informal care arrangements than in early childhood education, regardless of racial/ethnic background. For children in Mexican‐origin families, selection into informal care over early childhood education was more likely in zip codes with greater demand for care as measured by higher female employment. Utilization of parent care versus early childhood education was also more likely for children in Mexican‐origin and Black families in zip codes with higher female employment. Constraints associated with maternal employment thus hindered children from enrolling in early childhood education, and community contexts posed challenges for some groups.
https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12501
Mothers' Union Statuses and Their Involvement in Young Children's Schooling
Journal of Marriage and Family: Robert W. Ressler, Chelsea Smith, Shannon Cavanagh, Robert Crosnoe
U.S. schools often expect the educational involvement of parents, which may be facilitated when parents have partners, especially a partner also invested in the child. As such, parental involvement at school and at home could be a channel of the diverging destinies of U.S. children from different families. This study applied fixed effects modeling to the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort to examine the link between mothers' union statuses and their involvement behaviors. Being partnered appeared to benefit mothers' school and home involvement when children were in the primary grades, with little evidence of an additional benefit from that partnership being marital. A biological tie between the male partner and the child only seemed to matter for mothers' school involvement. These patterns did not vary by family income, maternal depression, or maternal employment, but they were stronger when children were just beginning schooling.
https://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12374