Abstract
This research note reports the results of interviews with 29 married couples about how they make charitable giving decisions. Most couples in the sample made decisions about donating small amounts separately and large amounts jointly. Most couples engaged in cooperative, not competitive, bargaining, as they tended to support the same charities and rarely disagreed about giving decisions. When couples did disagree, it was usually about the amount given, not the target, for large donations, and the target, not the amount given, for small ones. Sometimes one partner would act as the “gas pedal” and tend to want to donate money, while their spouse would act as the “brakes” and argue in favor of making a smaller donation or no donation. Cooperative bargaining also marked the process of increasing a donation, as one spouse would make a small initial decision and would later consult with the other about increasing the amount.
The majority of adults are married and marriage involves sharing financial resources and making joint financial decisions. Yet much of the literature on charitable giving treats donors as if they were isolated individuals, free to make choices about giving without having to consult their spouse. With one exception (Burgoyne, Young, & Walker, 2005), the few studies that do examine couples’ decision making limit their insights into the decision-making process to a few survey questions about whether couples make decisions separately or together, and which spouse has more influence over giving decisions. The actual process of how these decisions are made is still a “black box,” with what goes on inside the marriage invisible to scholars.
This study addresses this large gap in our knowledge by reporting the results of interviews with 29 married couples. It examines how couples actually make giving decisions, how they budget their giving, and whether they use competitive or cooperative bargaining. As the first study that we know of that uses interviews with both spouses, it provides information of use to both scholars and practitioners. For scholars, it has implications for the methodology of measuring charitable giving by showing that most of the donors in this sample who initially state that they make giving decisions jointly with their spouse actually make some giving decisions separately and some together. This indicates that some donors who indicate on surveys that they make joint decisions with their spouse may actually make some decisions jointly and some separately. The study contributes to empirical knowledge, elaborating on the theories of couples’ budgeting and bargaining, by showing that couples in this sample use a variety of explicit and implicit budgeting strategies and that couples in this sample primarily engage in cooperative, not competitive, bargaining. For practitioners, the study offers important insights into the dynamics of couples’ decision making and shows how charities might be able to increase donations by encouraging a donor to recruit his or her spouse into supporting the charity as well.
Review of the Literature
In general, studies have found that married people are more likely to give to charity than single people (Mesch, Rooney, Steinberg, & Denton, 2006; Wiepking & Bekkers, 2012). A longitudinal study found that men are more likely to give money to charity and give higher amounts shortly after getting married but that marriage did not have a similar short-term effect on women (Einolf & Philbrick, 2014).
Charitable Budgeting
A few articles look at how individuals make mental budgets for charitable giving, post donations to those budgets, and transfer between their charitable donation budget and other categories. Mental budgets are “a cognitive form of book-keeping that individuals use to keep track of expenses and control consumption” (LaBarge & Stinson, 2013, p. 994). Kahneman and Knetsch (1992) found that when people made additional charitable contributions they tended to draw the additional money out of their mental budgets for discretionary spending and entertainment, instead of reducing their current charitable spending. On the contrary, Flaherty and Diamond (1999) found that when people bought cause-related marketing products they charged the expense to their charitable giving budgets rather than taking the money from their consumption spending account. Stinson and Howard (2010) found that in cases of consumption-related philanthropy, in which donors receive tangible benefits such as event tickets for their donations, donors charged donations to consumption categories rather than charitable giving. LaBarge and Stinson (2013) found extensive evidence to support the malleability of charitable budgeting and advised charities to use the flexibility of categories to their advantage by encouraging donors to allocate gifts to multiple budgets.
Authority Over Giving Decisions
Researchers have categorized four possible ways for couples to make giving decisions within a marriage: the husband decides, the wife decides, decisions are joint, or decisions are separate (Andreoni, Brown, & Rischall, 2003; Wiepking & Bekkers, 2010). A study using data from a large nationally representative sample found that 89% of couples reported joint decision making (Brown, 2005).
The reported prevalence of joint decision making among married couples requires us to understand how these joint decisions take place. For economists, charitable giving decisions are similar to other purchase decisions, wherein each member of a married couple has different spending preferences and will bargain to reach a spending decision. Two economic models exist for this bargaining process, the competitive bargaining model and the cooperative bargaining model. The competitive bargaining model predicts that the partner with more education and more earnings will have more power in the bargaining process, and will therefore have more influence over decisions (Andreoni et al., 2003; Lundberg & Pollak, 1993; Yörük, 2010). The cooperative bargaining model predicts that despite a couple’s differences in power, they will decide to donate their money in a way that maximizes the well-being of each member of the couple (Brown, 2005). The cooperative model also assumes that like-minded individuals marry each other, so spouses have similar preferences for spending (Becker, 1991) and conflict over spending decisions is likely to be small.
The Decision-Making Process
There is very little prior research that goes beyond survey results to look at the actual processes that married couples go through when discussing charitable giving decisions. Burgoyne and colleagues (2005) used focus groups to solicit information from 28 individuals, 27 of whom were married or living with a partner (the spouse or partner was not present at the focus group). They found that charitable giving decisions “generally seemed to follow patterns already established in the household for other financial decisions,” and followed two decision-making patterns. “Planned, larger gifts to charity tended to be joint decisions agreed as part of the regular household budget, whereas more spontaneous and smaller gifts tended to be individual decisions” (Burgoyne et al., 2005, p. 391). No study has yet interviewed both spouses to determine how joint decision making actually occurs. The current article is a first step toward filling this gap.
Research Questions
As little previous research has looked inside the “black box” of couples’ decision making, our first research question is descriptive.
The second research question expands upon the currently limited research on implicit and explicit budgets for charitable giving, and uses qualitative data to describe and form a typology of couples’ budgeting strategies.
The third research question examines how couples bargain over charitable giving decisions, where disagreements tend to occur, and how charities at first supported by only one partner become charities supported by both.
Method
To gather information related to married couples’ decisions about charitable giving, we conducted semistructured interviews with 29 married couples in Chicago, Illinois. We chose to use semistructured interviews because they allow participants to respond unhindered to questions posed by the researcher. The choice to interview both spouses together was an important one. We wanted to receive the perspective of both partners on charitable giving, and we wanted to interview them together, not separately, to allow them to interact with each other while providing their responses. Interviewing couples together provides richer data and allows members of the couple to reflect on and respond to their partner’s answers. Instead of presenting a socially desirable cooperative facade, couples can and do disagree during joint interviews (Bjornholt & Farstad, 2014). Spouses’ discussions and disagreements in answering questions can provide insights into how they discuss and disagree about charitable donations.
Recruitment
We initially tried to recruit a representative sample through random-digit dialing, but found that few people were willing to participate, even though we offered each couple US$50 to compensate them for their time. We switched to a purposive sampling strategy, contacting three human service charities and asking them to recruit their donors to speak to us, and offering to donate US$50 to the charity for each couple who agreed to be interviewed. We obtained 12 couples from charitable referrals and six additional couples through a convenience sample of personal contacts. All 12 couples were relatively wealthy and were considered by the organizations to be major donors. In 2012, we received additional funding to recruit more married couples, which we attempted through advertisements and personal contacts. Again, we offered an inducement of US$50 for participation, but were only able to recruit 11 additional couples to interview. Although our final sample size of 29 couples (58 individuals) is adequate for qualitative analysis, the sample is not representative of the population of all donors.
Procedure
Researchers gave couples the option to select the interview location and most couples chose to be interviewed in their homes. The interviewers used a semistructured interview guide and the nature of the questions changed over the course of the interview process as respondents brought up unexpected issues. Because of this, we often report asking a question to fewer than 29 couples.
Several research assistants performed and transcribed the interviewers, and the principal investigator read the transcripts and performed the analysis, with assistance from the other two authors of this article. We organized our analysis around the three research questions using both open and closed coding (Patton, 2002). For closed coding, we used an Excel spreadsheet and coded sections of each interview quantitatively. For open coding, we collected responses to a particular question and generated categories inductively from the responses to that question.
Participant Profile
This study was exploratory and used a nonrepresentative sample, so it is not possible to generalize from the sample to the broader population. Twenty-nine heterosexual, married couples participated in the study, making 58 respondents in all. The couples had been married a range of 1 to 58 years, with a mean length of 19 years. Most couples (81%) had children, were White, college educated, and upper middle class to upper class in income and wealth.
Results
Before answering the three research questions of this study, we describe the respondents’ relative earnings, budgeting habits, and how they make decisions on household spending. In 55.2% of the couples in the sample, the husband earned more, in 31.0% the wife earned more, and in 13.8% both spouses earned about equal amounts of money (Table 1). Nearly all couples (82.8%) managed their money completely together, and the remaining 17.2% managed most of their money together but had separate accounts or credit cards for some expenses. Only 28.6% of the couples kept a budget for household expenses. In 55.2% of couples, the wife paid the bills and did the taxes, in 37.9% the husband did these tasks, and in 6.9% both spouses shared these responsibilities. In making ordinary purchases, nearly all couples in the sample (82.8%) explained that each individual bought less expensive items separately but consulted with one another on major purchases.
Earnings and Financial Management.
Question 1: How Do Couples Actually Make Decisions About Charitable Giving?
Nearly all couples (89.7%) at first stated that they made charitable giving decisions jointly, with one couple reporting that the wife made all the decisions unilaterally and two couples stating that they made giving decisions separately. However, follow-up questions revealed that most couples actually follow a pattern of separate and joint decision making that mirrored how they made other spending decisions. For major gifts, couples usually discuss and decide jointly the size and destination of their charitable dollars. For smaller gifts, couples provide one another leeway to make their own decisions. Eleven of the 17 couples who answered this question indicated that large gifts were made through joint decision making while smaller gifts were often done individually. Of these 11 couples, nine couples mentioned a specific amount or amounts ranging from US$25 to US$500 that would be considered small gifts. Another couple responded that once the gift became “regular” or annual they would discuss the matter and make a joint decision. The nature of this separate and shared decision is evident in the responses below.
I think there’s a dollar amount threshold . . . like I may give $50 or a $100 to an organization if I go as a guest, but I wouldn’t be giving $500 or $1,000 without talking to [my husband] first.
Generally, if it’s something that like, either one of us wants to just like give $100, we pretty much just write those checks on our own or do that. If we’re going to go beyond sort of a basic donation like that, then we’re going to talk about it, but for $100 we would pretty much just write that check as long as it wasn’t too far-fetched.
Question 2: How Do Couples Make and Comply With Budgets for Charitable Donations?
Couples used a variety of budgeting strategies in making decisions about charitable contributions. Of the 23 couples who discussed their charitable budgeting process, five (21.7%) had no charitable budget and made all donations as spur of the moment decisions, donating small amounts to charity when asked (Table 2). For these couples, charity was only a small part of their annual expenses and was treated as a type of nonessential consumption spending. Seven couples (30.4%) made a plan for donating and set a goal for their overall giving, most often a percentage of their income. Most of these couples were highly religious and were influenced by the idea of tithing, although few gave as much as 10% and none gave exclusively to their religious congregation. Three couples (13.0%) made a rough assessment of their giving and financial position periodically and adjusted their charitable giving accordingly. Finally, eight couples (34.8%) adopted a combined approach, having a budget for major and recurring gifts but making spur of the moment decisions when solicited to make small one-time donations.
Decisions on Charitable Giving.
Five couples (21.7%) had no charitable budget and responded to requests for donations on a case by case basis. Seven couples (30.4%) had an explicit budget for charity, usually a percentage of their income:
So we kind of have a system. We give 10% because it’s out of obedience to God. We don’t give our entire tithe to the church. We cut it in thirds. So we do world, city, and church. We try to be mindful of those buckets. So when we go to fundraisers we keep in mind that this is local, this is church, this is international. But anytime one of our friends ask us to be part of something or an event—we’ll give something.
Three couples (13.0%) did not set a budget at the beginning of the year but reviewed their income and donations occasionally and adjusted their giving if they were donating too much or too little. One couple did this at irregular intervals but two couples did this at the end of each year:
I guess we just, we sort of look at the year. How does the year feel and, you know, what we feel comfortable giving is what we give.
Finally, eight couples (34.8%) combine the budgeting and impulse approach, budgeting money to one or a few important charities and making small impulse donations to others:
There’s one, World Vision, that we decided at the beginning of the year that every month we would do a set amount. Everything else we just agreed that we would always donate whenever something came up that we felt like doing.
We decide on each charity separately. We have a bucket that we set aside for the church and then all charities outside of the church we talk about it.
Question 3: Do Couples Engage in Competitive or Cooperative Bargaining?
When asked whether they disagreed over giving decisions, the vast majority of couples (85.8%) said they did not. When there was disagreement, there was no indication that the spouse who earned more money had more power over the joint giving decision. Further supporting the cooperative bargaining model, most couples indicated that they made most of their donations to charities both spouses supported.
Some couples, however, gave examples of charities that only one partner supported. The reasons for not sharing a charity included different interests (two respondents), experiences and giving that predated the marriage (five respondents), and different social networks (eight respondents). Examples of different interests include one couple in which the husband gave to the local classical music station because he enjoyed listening to it, while his wife did not like classical music and did not donate. In another couple, the wife supported the animal shelter while her husband, less of an animal lover, did not.
In five cases, experiences which predated the marriage led one spouse to give to a charity while the other spouse, not sharing the interest or experience, did not. In all five cases, the donor was the husband. Examples include a husband donating to fraternal organizations, another giving money to his alma mater, and a husband giving money to a religious charity connected to his Catholic university. Another husband explained,
There’s some that I’ve written a check for 25, 30 years, you know whether it’s Amnesty International or some environmental organization where we give a very modest amount that I don’t think [my wife] really cares about. But I’ve been doing it for so long that I continue to. (Husband, Couple 14)
The most common reason (eight respondents) for separate charities involved different social networks. Most respondents reported making many small donations to charities in response to requests from friends and colleagues, and when these requests came from friends or colleagues known to only one spouse, the charitable giving decisions made separately. These were one-time donation decisions in which the other spouse was not involved, not recurring donations that the other spouse did not support.
How separate decisions become joint decisions
When a married couple begins giving to a new charity, the decision usually starts with one partner deciding separately to make a gift, usually in response to a request from a friend, work colleague, or family member. These were small contributions that the respondent made on his or her own without consulting the spouse. If one spouse wanted to keep supporting that charity, he or she would then have to inform the spouse of what he or she was doing. At this point, the interest, support, or opposition of the spouse can influence whether the initial gift turns into a regular gift.
My father has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, so now I’ll do the Alzheimer’s walk and I’ll donate. There’s a charity event coming up and so, when things mean more to me, we will donate more, which means there will be more of a joint decision then.
We don’t sit down and have a real deep discussion, it’s just kind of in passing and mentioned. Seems to be like if I’ve mentioned it four times I’m good, I’m good to go. Right? I haven’t gotten a real solid no. But [husband’s name], same for him, because you have had some work things, stuff like that.
Yeah, it’s almost more, [there’s] a more independent quality to it except for the regular stuff. Once it gets to regular giving and we honestly talk about it, it just keeps on going, but the initial decisions are more independent.
How does one spouse get the other involved in supporting a charity? One way involves attending charity fundraising events together. One member of the couple donates to the charity and is invited to an event. When they bring their spouse to the event, the spouse learns about the mission of the charity, gets excited about its programs, and becomes a supporter.
Disagreements
Couples usually agreed about charitable giving but they did have disagreements from time to time. Several couples mentioned that for major gifts, including those that reoccur across several years, the couple rarely disagrees on the target of the donation but may disagree on the amount to give.
I am guided by her, you know, when she says “that’s too much.”
You’re guided by me tearing my hair out, and it’s like “No!”
For minor donations, couples are more likely to disagree on the target of the donation, and are less concerned about the relatively small amount of money given. In this case, it is less about the financial concerns of giving and more about the worthiness of the organizations receiving the couples’ pooled resources.
I mean there are some [organizations] that I prefer to not give to, but for $100 I’m not going to argue about it.
We fight about it all the time. Just yesterday night we fought about it. Which is funny now that you are here talking about it. A better example would be [organization name], the mentoring organization. He decided to give some and verbally told the person that we would give. Then he told me, and I told him I don’t feel committed to giving to that place. But he did and we kind of had a little tiff over it. But he ended up giving it anyway. I usually let him do it in the end because his heart is really big.
A prominent theme involving disagreement over charitable giving came from couples’ responses to a question about which spouse was the most likely to give to charity, if approached. Spouses almost always agreed which person that was, with seven of the 16 couples who were asked the question (43.8%) stating that it was the husband, five (37.5%) saying it was the wife, and three (18.8%) saying it depended on the situation. We did not ask specifically about this dynamic, but our coding revealed that in seven couples one spouse acted as the “gas pedal,” responding emotionally and positively to requests for money, and the other acted as the “brakes,” taking a more intellectual approach and encouraging their spouse to consider other expenses.
Although relative earnings did not influence who acted as the brakes in giving decisions, who pays the bills did affect this role. Of the seven couples who indicated that the gas pedal and brakes relationship occurs in their relationship, six couples identified the bill-payer as the brakes. The brakes position may be related to the spouse’s familiarity with household expenses and consequently greater familiarity of household finances and resources available for charitable causes. Although most couples do not explicitly link their role as the brakes to familiarity with budget, two participants did state that this role had an impact on the decision-making process.
Discussion
This study used interview data from 29 married couples to describe how they made decisions about charitable giving. It found that nearly all couples in the sample made giving decisions both separately and together, with couples deciding about small donations separately and large donations jointly. Couples in this sample had several approaches to charitable budgeting, with some couples having an explicit budget, some having no budget, some occasionally reviewing their giving, and some having a budget for large donations only. Couples in this sample engaged in cooperative bargaining, not competitive bargaining, and rarely disagreed about donations.
Our findings have both methodological and theoretical implications for future research. In regard to methodology, our study casts some doubt on the conclusions of earlier research that use a few survey questions about who decides to divide couples into categories (Andreoni et al., 2003; Brown, 2005; Wiepking & Bekkers, 2010; Yörük, 2010). As in our study, the majority of couples in these other studies report that they make charitable giving decisions together. However, our study shows that couples who claim to make decisions jointly actually make many decisions separately. Future research using representative samples should continue to examine how couples respond to the “who decides” questions and follow this up with interview research to test the validity of survey responses.
One empirical contribution of this study relates to its findings on budgeting strategies. Although budgeting, both explicit and implicit, is an important topic in consumer spending research, it has received little study in regard to charitable giving. The one prior study on this topic (LaBarge & Stinson, 2013) found that mental budgets did exist for charitable giving and described some aspects of mental budgeting but did not explore how couples formed and negotiated mental and explicit budgets. Our research builds upon this work by showing how donors’ budgeting practices fall into four possible categories: no budget, percentage or tithe, a periodic assessment of giving, and a budget for large donations only. Future research should investigate how explicit budgeting strategies for large gifts may interact with implicit mental budgets for smaller gifts, and whether people draw upon other categories of spending to justify large or small gifts.
A second empirical contribution involves bargaining. Empirical research has used the “who decides” questions on surveys to argue that competitive bargaining in shared decision making creates transaction costs that depress giving (Andreoni et al., 2003), or that cooperative bargaining increases charitable giving (Brown, 2005). The latter view has been supported by recent studies that show that couples who decide jointly give more to charity (Wiepking & Bekkers, 2010; Yörük, 2010). Instead of inferring results about bargaining from the relative amounts given by joint-deciding and separately deciding couples, our study looks at what couples actually say and do; in our sample, couples overwhelmingly use cooperative bargaining. Future research should apply similar methods to a nationally representative sample to see whether the prevalence of cooperative bargaining holds.
Even though couples engage in cooperative bargaining most of the time, they still disagree occasionally, and our research made a number of discoveries about how and why couples disagree. In regard to large donations, couples tend to disagree over the amount, not the target, showing agreement on values but disagreement on the state of the couple’s finances. With small donations, couples tend to disagree on the target, for reasons of values (is the charity worth donating to at all), not because of differences of opinion about the couples’ ability to give. When conflicts arise about whether to give money or not, the member of the couple who exerts power and says no is more often the person who pays the bills or the person who earns more. Both findings support a competitive bargaining model in which the person with more power in the form of income, knowledge, or control is more likely to say no to a donation request. Thus, within the mostly cooperative bargaining over charitable donations, competitive bargaining can still take place when disagreements arise, and the member of the couple with more power tends to win these disagreements.
The present study does have limitations that should be addressed in future research. First, the sample is small, nonrepresentative, and contains only opposite-sex couples. Future research should use a larger and nationally representative sample that includes an oversample of same-sex couples. The self-reported nature of the interview introduces bias, and future research should involve lab experiments and field experiments that examine couples actually making charitable donation decisions.
Despite these limitations, our findings have practical implications for fundraisers. Fundraisers have long known that married people consult their spouse when making a significant gift, and textbooks advise fundraisers to request large gifts in a manner that allows potential donors to consult with their spouse. Our research supports the validity of this approach. We see that spouses can continue to support a charity independently for years, but their gifts to that charity remain small. Only when both partners support a charity do gifts grow in size. Fundraisers should concentrate on turning their charity from “his” or “her” charity into “our” charity. One way to do this is to have fundraising events that both spouses attend but there may be others.
This study is a first attempt to peer inside the “black box” of couple decision making to examine how couples actually bargain over charitable giving decisions. Although the study is limited by the nonrepresentative nature of the sample, the findings of this study provide an initial view of these decision-making processes. It is hoped that future studies will build and expand upon our findings.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was funded in part by a grant from the Kresge Foundation’s Advancing Knowledge in Human Services grant program.