Research on Volunteering

Surveys in different countries show that people often choose to volunteer in the sport and recreation field.  During 2006, Sport and Recreation New Zealand (SPARC) commissioned research to look at how to motivate and recruit more volunteers, and successive SPARC studies show how important volunteers are to sport in New Zealand. This edition of Research to Practice considers how this detailed research can be applied across all volunteer-involving organisations.

GoVolunteer is the recruitment website of Volunteering Australia and is run in partnership with SEEK, an Internet employment website. From the 9th to the 31st of May 2005, a survey was placed on the website with the intention to collect data from people visiting the site. Analysing this data would enable a comparison of online tools for recruitment with more traditional methods, and help Volunteering Australia target its activities.

The survey gathered 1,413 responses out of a total number of 49,291 site visits. As sample sizes go, this ought to tell us a great deal about people using online volunteer matching sites.   What we do not know is whether the respondents are representative of users. For example, as we shall see below, the responses came overwhelmingly from women. Is that because more women use the site, or that women were more likely to answer the survey?

Happily the report also includes its own ‘applications of findings’ section to draw out the lessons of the research. This Research to Practice looks at the report and the findings.

In a recent report, The National Youth Agency in England explores the skills, knowledge and attitudinal development that young people derive from volunteering. The research did not intend to evaluate volunteering projects in terms of quality or volunteer management. Rather, the study focused on how youth benefited from volunteering, and what mattered most to them during the volunteer process. The researchers explored this issue in depth through 30 case studies and interviews with 215 young people. This Research to Practice reviews the key themes of this report, suggests how organizations can use the findings to promote the message of volunteering to the young, and discusses how the results can benefit and enhance the volunteering experiences for volunteers of all ages.

In this quarter's issue, Harrison discusses her "logic model of decision making," designed to guide managers of volunteer resources through the steps and choices associated with managing virtual volunteering. This interview is a follow-up to Harrison’s interview in the last quarter of e-Volunteerism, where she discussed the misconceptions about virtual volunteering. 

As the populations of most developed countries show an increasing
proportion of older people, debates have started about how an aging
population will be cared for.  For volunteering, this often means how
volunteers will be engaged to help care for the elderly.  But this assumption ignores two vital facts: one, that volunteering can help keep older people healthy; and two, that older people are active and a potential  source of more volunteers.

This report focuses on research designed to better understand volunteering among older people. It looks at the conditions under which older people become volunteers, their capacity to remain volunteers as they age, and the constraints that may cause them to restrict their volunteering. The report draws out implications for volunteer-involving organisations and policy makers.

This collaborative research project by Susan Baines, Mabel Lie, and Jane Wheelock was produced in 2006 as a collaborative research project by Age Concern Newcastle and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

After more than a decade of promoting virtual volunteering or online service as an important new development (which it is) for the volunteer field, it's time to step back and look at what is really happening as organizations put the theory into practice.  Yvonne D. Harrison, Assistant Professor of Nonprofit Leadership at Seattle University, has done some innovative research on virtual volunteering, particularly in Canada.  She also wrote her PhD dissertation on the subject and is devoted to helping practitioners understand the theoretical foundation of their work. In this interview with e-Volunteerism, Yvonne tackles misconceptions about virtual volunteering by sharing her research on such issues as how much is going on, who actually engages in it and how they engage, the appropriateness of virtual assignments and management implications, among other points.

2005 in the UK was the Year of the Volunteer, with a programme of events designed to increase the profile of volunteering. To build on its legacy, the England Volunteering Development Council, a high-level representative mechanism of volunteering, established The Commission for the Future of Volunteering to develop a long-term vision for volunteering in England. To inform this, a literature review was undertaken which aimed to look at what is going on in the world of volunteering, particularly examining societal changes and the impact these may have on volunteering.

 

The resulting report by Colin Rochester was published in December 2006 and is the focus of this Research to Practice review.