Does the standard voluntary association question capture informal associations?

Sociologists have long been attentive to participation in associational life. Yet, despite being repeatedly cautioned to consider more informal groups, most researchers focus on participation in formal voluntary associations using national surveys with fixed group categories, such as the General Social Survey (GSS). In this paper, we use new GSS data on the names of the voluntary associations listed by respondents to evaluate whether voluntary association prompts capture or miss various types of informal associations. We code the formality of the associations listed by respondents and also compare to a new sample of bottom-up, informal voluntary associations. We demonstrate that some response categories adequately capture both formal and informal associations, e.g., sports groups. However, our results also suggest that the standard voluntary association question both omits entire categories of informal associations and omits some informal variants of associations within categories. In the tradition of Baumgartner and Walker (1988), Wuthnow (1994), and Wellman et al. (2001), we suggest that we may misunderstand citizen associations if we ignore informal associating.