JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS EDUCATION - National ...

Indirect Giving to Nonprofit Organizations: An Emerging Model
of Student Philanthropy
1. “Very negative or negative” effect.
2. “No effect.”
3. “Very positive or positive” effect.
• Means and standard deviations. Another way that this study analyzes
the effects of student philanthropy is to look at the mean response to
each of the survey items listed. It also looks at the standard deviations,
in order to assess the amount of variation across the 37 students who
responded to the survey.
• Regression analyses. The regression analyses attempt to explain
variation in the effects that the indirect-giving project has on students.
There are two types of dependent variables here:
1. Students’ awareness, interests and intentions related to the
nonprofit sector, and
2. Students’ interest in and learning of the course content.
There also are two sets of independent variables that may have
moderated the effect of the philanthropy project on students. The first
set consists of student activities related to the philanthropy project:
1. Whether the student participated in site visits, and
2. Whether the student presented to the corporation’s philanthropic
board.
In regards to site visits, the project did not have site visits in Spring
2007. It did have site visits in Fall 2007 and Spring 2008, but a few
students were not able to participate in them. In regards to board
presentations, the number of student-presenters was limited to three
each semester, due to the size of the board room.
The second set of independent variables consists of student assessments
of key elements of the philanthropy project in two areas:
1. Satisfaction with the quality of proposals submitted by nonprofits,
and
2. Satisfaction with the final monetary awards or grants by the
corporation’s philanthropic board.
In addition, all of the regression models included control variables
related to demographic characteristics of individual students, for which
data were collected on the end-of-semester surveys. (See Appendix B for
a condensed version of the survey instrument.) These demographic
control variables included age (1 =