Informal Volunteering, Relational Practice and the Challenge of Measurement

Informal volunteering is widely recognised as an important form of civic participation and community support, yet it remains one of the most difficult dimensions of volunteering to define and measure. Existing frameworks typically describe informal volunteering as unpaid help provided directly to individuals outside formal organisational structures. However, growing evidence suggests that many activities classified by researchers as volunteering are not understood by participants in those terms. Drawing on relational sociology, this paper examines how informal volunteering is understood, classified, and measured through a multimethod study comprising a Delphi panel of volunteering experts (n = 7), a survey (n = 94), and cognitive interviews (n = 8). Originally undertaken to inform the development of volunteering questions for the Irish Census, the study generated broader insights into the conceptual boundaries of informal volunteering. Findings reveal a consistent pattern across all three stages of the research. Experts anticipated difficulties in defining and measuring informal volunteering, survey respondents demonstrated substantial uncertainty when classifying informal volunteering activities, and interview participants frequently distinguished volunteering from helping neighbours, friends, and community members. While activities undertaken through organisations were widely recognised as volunteering, activities embedded within everyday social relationships were more often understood through the languages of care, reciprocity, neighbourliness, friendship, and community support. The paper argues that informal volunteering functions as a relational social practice rather than as a clearly bounded category of volunteer work. Difficulties in measuring informal volunteering therefore reflect not only methodological limitations but also a mismatch between institutional definitions and everyday understandings of participation and support. The study contributes to debates on the conceptualisation of informal volunteering, advances relational approaches to civic participation, and suggests that challenges in measurement are conceptual before they are methodological.