Trends in studies on the theme of NPOs and volunteers in Japanese sociology

Abstract

In order to explore trends in NPO/volunteer research in Japanese sociology, this study analyzed the trends of papers published and the contents of their discussion in academic journals of Japanese sociology. As a quantitative trend, articles containing "NPO", "volunteer", and related words in their titles have been published in the journals since the late 1990s. There was a period when the number of publications increased regularly, which was in response to the time when NPOs and volunteers gained social attention, such as the enforcement of important laws and the occurrence of serious disasters. Many papers have conducted empirical methods, especially qualitative analysis. This was a trend in line with a paradigm shift in Japanese sociology as "from theoretical studies to case studies". Furthermore, in this paper, KH Coder was used to analyze the frequent words that appear in the paper titles and how they are connected. This analysis extracted the major points of the discussion in NPO and volunteer research in sociology. The welfare community formation by social welfare NPO, social movement, instrumental and expressive significance of volunteers, and the power structure inside and outside volunteers were extracted as the major topics in those papers.