German Survey on Volunteering

Microdata of the first wave in 1999 comprise information on 14,922 participants, which were surveyed via a computer-assisted telephone interviews (CATI) between May and July 1999. The sample was drawn as representative landline sample of the resident population aged 14 years and older. As the questions were asked exclusively in German, the survey is representative for the German-speaking resident population of Germany.

The survey aimed at a sufficient size of the sample for each of the 16 federal states (Länder) of Germany in order to enable state-specific analyses. Thus, the sample has been stratified disproportionately according to the population of every federal state. The sampling frame for the sample 1999 was generated using a Random-Last-Digit-Method according to ADM-standard.

As in the other survey years participants were asked for information on the following topics:

• Memberships and activities in general
• Volunteering
• Most time consuming/intensive and, if applicable, second activity
• Context of volunteering
• Further characteristics of voluntary activity
• Donations
• Background information about the person

Further information on the data set can be found in thedocumentation and on the pages of the research project German Survey on Volunteering.

For reasons of data protection, the factually anonymized data sets can only be provided after a data distribution contract has been signed. Data is available free of charge to scientific researchers for non-profitable purposes only and requires written permission of the data distributor (FDZ-DZA). The form to apply for the use of FWS-data can be found here: application form.