Mobilizing to take responsibility: exploring the relationship between Sense of Community Responsibility (SOC-R), Public Service Motivation (PSM) and public service resilience during Covid-19

ABSTRACT

This paper explores how other-oriented motivations: Sense of Community Responsibility (SOC-R) and Public Service Motivation (PSM) relate to voluntary support during the Covid-19 crisis. Drawing on original panel survey data, collected spring 2020, it compares SOC-R and PSM for civic participation. The study reveals that while both forms of motivations relate to voluntary support, PSM remains stable over time while SOC-R varies. Furthermore, SOC-R develops differently over time for those who engage in voluntary support and those who do not. Such heterogeneity is not observed for PSM. Based on these findings, the paper discusses SOC-R’s contribution to public service resilience.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19
• public service resilience
• public service motivations
• Sense of Community Responsibility
• volunteering
• public service provision
• crisis

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Research Assistant Mia Lunding Christensen, who, from a comprehensive analysis of numerous documents, composed a detailed historical resumé of the phases of the Covid-19 lockdown in Denmark.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Source: Statistics Denmark, StatBank Denmark at www.statistikbanken.dk/FOLK1C, visited 2021–05-04.

2. Crisis awareness was measured by a survey question asking about different subjective dimensions of the respondents’ perception of COVID-19. First part of the question was: ‘To what degree do you experience the new corona virus/COVID-19 as…’ which then was followed by different scenarios like ‘frightening’ or ‘something close to me’ which the respondent evaluated on a likert scale ranging from ‘Not at all’ to ‘To a very high degree’. Crisis awareness was measured by the scenario ‘something I think about all the time.’ We recognize that this scenario do not define COVID-19 as a crisis per se. Thus, we cannot exclude the possibility that the respondents think about COVID-19 as something different than a crisis, for instance a personal challenge. However, in the context of the data collection period, the spring and early summer of 2020 where the public framing consistently was in terms of crisis, we find that the responses to the question provides an acceptable indicator of the average level of crisis awareness in the Danish population.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Carlsbergfondet [CF17-0199]; Samfund og Erhverv, Det Frie Forskningsråd [0213-00028B].

Notes on contributors

Jonas Toubøl

Jonas Toubøl, Ph.D., is a political sociologist at Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. His area of research encompasses social movements, civil society, unionization and social class. In addition, Jonas explores new approaches to mixed methods and data triangulation of both quantitative and qualitative data combining interview, ethnography, register, survey and social media data.

Hjalmar Bang Carlsen

Hjalmar Bang Carlsen, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral researcher at SODAS and Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. His research interests are political sociology, especially social movements and issue politics, and digital social research methodologies that combine quantitative and qualitative approaches in the study of social interaction and social change.

Marie Haarmark Nielsen

Marie Haarmark Nielsen is a graduate student and research assistant at the Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen

Benedikte Brincker

Benedikte Brincker, Ph.D., is the Head of Department at Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. She has published widely in the field of political and historical sociology, especially in the area of state-nation relations. She has applied this body of theory to European nation states and to the Arctic Region and has combined it with research in the field of sociology of education and public administration.