Charitable giving to distant others

Rob Mittelman received an RRU Research Development Grant in 2016 to study the reasons Canadians donate money to help strangers in need.

Why do Canadians donate money to people they may never see, living in countries they may never visit, in cultures not their own? How do they choose which distant strangers to help?

Dr. Rob Mittelman has been interested in these questions ever since his doctoral dissertation. Wanting to further explore the issue he undertook a survey of Canadians to find out the answers to those questions. What he learned was how Canadians perceive distance, how belief in a just (or unjust) world impacts the charitable activities of Canadians, and the beliefs that underpin Canadians giving.

Mittelman’s findings from this study have been published in the Journal of Macromarketing and the International Review on Public and Nonprofit Marketing as well as accepted for presentation at numerous international conferences including the Academy of Marketing Sciences Conference, the Association for Nonprofit & Social Economy Research Conference, and the Academy of International Business Conference.