Factors Affecting the Location of Voluntary Organization Branches

In: Policy & politics, Band 6, Heft 2, S. 163-172

Abstract

The contribution that voluntary organizations can make to social welfare is affected by the fact that the branches of most national organizations are not distributed evenly over the country. The study reported here was carried out for the Wolfenden Committee on Voluntary Organizations in order to examine the extent of this unevenness and to see whether the distribution was random or followed a pattern.
The study was confined to the towns in England and Wales with a population in 1971 of over 50,000. London and the London boroughs were omitted. For each town the following information was obtained: 1) whether each of 22 national voluntary organizations had a branch located in the town; and 2) 26 indicators of economic and social conditions mostly drawn from the 1971 census. The 22 voluntary organizations and the 26 indicators are listed in Appendix 1.
The towns were classified on the basis of the 26 indicators, employing a technique derived from Moser and Scott's British Towns. A computer analysis was used to identify the main underlying factors that seemed to account for most variations in the 26 indicators.