Sociological Forum, VoL 13, No. 3, 1998 Being Volunteered? The Impact of Social Participation and Pro-Social Attitudes on Volunteering 1 Thomas Janoski,2'3 March Musick,4 and John Wilson5 While disagreeing over the reasons why the performance of civic obligations seems to be declining, conservatives and liberals agree that people need to be reminded of their duties as citizens for this decline to be halted. But do these exhortations work? This paper tests two theories about how people become volunteers. The "normativist" perspective assumes that volunteer behavior flows from socialization into pro-social attitudes; the "social practice" perspective stresses the formative role of practical experiences and social participation. Using a panel study of high school seniors who were reinterviewed in their mid-20s and again in their early 30s, we show that volunteer work undertaken in high school has long-term benefits as does social participation more generally but that socialization into pro-social attitudes has an even stronger influence on volunteering in middle age. The implications of our study are that mandatory community service programs can boost later volunteer efforts but that socialization into appropriate citizenship attitudes is of equal, if not greater, importance. KEY WORDS: volunteer work; social participation; civic obligation; citizenship; pro-social attitudes; social practice; normativist; community service programs. 'An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Society for the Study of Socio-Economics (SASE) Convention in Washington, DC, in 1995. Department of Sociology, 1571 Patterson Office Tower, University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky 40506-0027; email: tjanos@pop.uky.edu. 3To whom correspondence should be addressed. 4Institute for Social Research, 2209, University of Michigan, Box 1248, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48106-1248. Department of Sociology, Duke University, Box 90088, Durham, North Carolina 27708-0088. 495 0884-8971/98A»00-0495$15.00A) © 1998 Plenum Publishing Corporation