Young People in Scotland Survey 2022
Volunteer Scotland's fourth survey of young people investigating their engagement with volunteering, which is based on data from Ipsos’ omnibus survey of secondary school pupils across Scotland.
Key findings:
The results reveal a marked decline in volunteering participation between 2019-2022:
- Formal volunteering – down 12 percentage points from 49% to 37%
- Informal volunteering – down 7 percentage points from 25% to 18%
This is perhaps unsurprising given the potential impacts of COVID-19, the war in Ukraine and now the cost of living crisis on young people’s health and wellbeing. Other contributory factors may include:
- Volunteering tasks being less suited to young people during crises.
- COVID-19 and the cost of living crisis restricting the spaces in which formal youth volunteering takes place.
- The closure of schools during COVID-19 which removed the positive influence of teachers in supporting young people’s participation in volunteering.
Formal Volunteering* • Current engagement: – 37% of young people formally volunteer – 11 percentage points higher than the adult level of 26% in 2020. – Equivalent to 114,000 secondary school pupils providing approximately 9.7 million hours p.a. • Future engagement: 20% of ‘non-volunteers’ would like to volunteer in the future. • The growth trend evidenced between 2009 – 2016, which stalled in 2019, is now evidencing a significant decline of 12 percentage points between 2019 – 2022:
Frequency: 61% of young volunteers volunteered regularly (at least once a month) and 17% occasionally (less than once a month).
Deprivation: As in previous years young people living in the least deprived areas had the highest formal youth participation rate (38%), while those living in the most deprived areas had the lowest formal youth participation rate (28%).
Benefits: career benefits are important – especially skills development (for 46% of youth volunteers). However, wellbeing, social capital & altruistic benefits tend to be cited more frequently than career benefits.
