JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS EDUCATION - National ...

Indirect Giving to Nonprofit Organizations: An Emerging Model
of Student Philanthropy
Regression Analyses
Table 3 shows results of the regression analyses that attempt to explain
variation in the effects of the philanthropy project on students’ awareness,
interests, and intentions, as related to the nonprofit sector. There are six
regression models in this set of analyses, each with a unique dependent variable
that measures an effect of the student philanthropy project. The independent
variables in these models include each sudent’s activities that were related to the
philanthropy project (whether he/she conducted site visits to the nonprofits and
whether he/she made a presentation to the corporation’s philanthropic board), as
well as each student’s assessment of certain key elements of the philanthropy
project (the degree to which he/she was satisfied with the quality of the
nonprofits’ proposals, and the degree to which he/she was satisfied with the final
grants by the corporation’s philanthropic board). The control variables are each
student’s age, race, and gender.
Please note that the “pilot semester” control variable was dropped from all of
the regression models due to multicollinearity. Most noteworthy was a correlation
of -0.95 between the “pilot semester” and the independent variable “site visit.”
Recall that the pilot semester of the philanthropy project in the MPA class did not
involve site visits, because there was an expectation of a large number of proposals
from nonprofits, which would have made site visits unfeasible.
The amount of variation explained by each model ranges from very little to
quite a lot. R 2 is only 0.214 in the model with “awareness of social problems” as
the dependent variable, but it jumps up to 0.608 in the model with “awareness
of nonprofits” as the dependent variable. The demographic control variables
included age (1 =