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Methodology and Data Sources

Methodology and Data Sources

The Johns Hopkins Comparative Nonprofit Sector Project sought to develop a common base of data about a similar set of “nonprofit” or “voluntary” institutions in a disparate set of countries. This required that we resolve five critical methodological and conceptual challenges:


  • To select a set of countries that differed enough along key dimensions to allow us to test some of the major theories in this field;

  • To define more precisely and more concretely what we meant by “nonprofit” or “voluntary” organizations to be sure that we were examining the same phenomenon in all of the countries;

  • To develop a classification scheme that could differentiate the various types of entities that share the resulting common features;

  • To identify the most meaningful, but still feasible, aspects of these organizations to focus on for data-gathering purposes; and

  • To devise a way to collect reliable data on these aspects in a cost-efficient fashion.


    • Click here to open a document that describes how we went about these five tasks and provides more detail on the actual sources of data used in the various countries.