Research on Volunteering

Volunteering is generally thought of as a mechanism in which people choose to assist others.  Recent work, however, has indicated that volunteering possesses a number of ancillary attributes in respect to positively affecting those who volunteer.  Volunteering, for example, has been shown to contribute to the overall physical and psychological health of those who volunteer.  In this Along the Web we’ll examine another positive aspect of volunteering – its ability to assist those who have been excluded from the social, economic and political mainstream. And we’ll focus on resources for assisting those of you who wish to broaden and diversify your volunteer base.

This is a somewhat eclectic and arbitrary selection and we’ve chosen to simply group the results into rough categories, many of which overlap:  persons with mental illness; persons with disabilities; immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers; low-income and unemployed people; minorities and ethnic communities; homeless persons;  Aboriginal and Native communities.

Do we need another study on volunteer motives? Michael Callow’s work (published in the International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing) argues that we do and that there is value in looking at volunteering among retirees. Too often, says Callow, we categorise types of volunteers into broad groups, with ‘older volunteers’ put into a category that merely allows them to be contrasted with other groups. This, however, leads to assumptions that all older volunteers come with the same motives and aspirations for their involvement.

While I think that Callow may not have considered all the many and varied studies into older peoples’ participation, there is some truth in what he says. As a result, this piece of research is an interesting contribution to thinking, especially as it comes from the perspective of an assistant professor of marketing, not from someone who focuses exclusively on volunteers.

“Along the Web” for this issue updates the first topic we examined back in 2000:  volunteer program liability and risk management. This is a topic that has received a lot of attention during the past five years, with a corresponding amount of materials produced to discuss it.  We’ll divide our annotated list of over 30 items into materials of general interest and materials connected to specific aspects of volunteering or liability.

This Research to Practice reviews a report on recruiting and retaining volunteers to work with AIDS service organisations. The study findings were developed through a survey of volunteers plus interviews and focus groups with managers of volunteers. The study examined  the experiences, perceptions and realities of work in this area. The researchers then tackled the challenges they found and came up with a raft of recommendations. The review of this report examines the research, its conclusions and the recommendations.

A year ago the RGK Center at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) started the Investigator series and has generously shared pre-publication drafts with the readers of e-Volunteerism to get additional input.  The goal of the series is to act as a resource and a promoter of in-depth research on volunteerism. 

This fourth issue of the Investigator describes various approaches to volunteer valuation.  Such approaches may not be groundbreaking information for the seasoned administrator, but having a compilation and an assessment of several valuation methods in one place should be beneficial to anyone who works with volunteers. The current issue of the Investigator aspires to be a central source of such information

We commonly do “Along the Web” by subject categories, but in the past issue I thought I’d just list a variety of interesting reports that have shown up recently that either don’t fit neatly into categories or are within subject areas that we have already covered. This continues the listings from the last issue because I seem to have a very large number of these things that are too good to just ignore.

We commonly do “Along the Web” by subject categories, but in this issue I thought I’d just list a variety of interesting reports that have shown up recently that either don’t fit neatly into categories or are within subject areas that we have already covered. We’ll continue this listing in our next issue because I seem to have a very large number of these things that are too good to just ignore.

This article examines a research report done at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada by Evelina J. Rog, S. Mark Pancer, and Mark C. Baetz: “Corporate Volunteer Programs: Maximising Employee Motivation and Minimizing Barriers to Program Participation.” The research was done on the Ford Motor Company’s employee volunteer programme and is based on in-depth interviews with over 100 staff. It outlines six key points to increase employee volunteering. The Research-to-Practice article highlights where the findings resonate with other volunteering research, but also notes some areas where convincing companies to have an employee volunteering programme might encounter barriers not addressed in this research.

One of the more interesting, and more useful, new ways of engaging people in volunteering developed in the past decade has been the concept of “family volunteering,” recruiting entire family units to volunteer together.

The implementation of family volunteering has made the greatest progress in the United States and Canada, and most of the resources listed here are from those countries, but we’re looking for both the UK and Australia to, so to speak, join the family on this one….

Steve McCurley provides his usual annotated look at Web resources in three categories for family volunteering: Sites and Programs; Research and Manuals; and Sample Forms and Materials.

Research-to-Practice Editor Steven Howlett re-visits a paper by Colin Rochester published in Voluntary Action, the journal of the Institute for Volunteering Research in 1999, about the management implications for volunteer coordination based on the organisational setting in which it takes place. Rochester observed that organisational context will impact upon how volunteering is managed, but this context is not very well addressed in the research literature and, as a result, best practice writing often gives minimal advice about how practice can vary from organisation to organisation.

The paper argues that there have been two implicit assumptions in the literature which may explain why the organisational context of volunteering has received less attention. The first is that what is being measured and described as volunteering is seen to be essentially the same activity regardless of where it happens. Second is the tendency to view volunteering as part of the non-profit sector, where it is seen as primarily unpaid workers contributing to the goals of the organisation; the result of this is a dominance management language emphasising the ‘workplace model’ of management.

Note:  Thanks to the generous permission of the Institute for Volunteering Research, the full text of the original study is provided as a PDF accompanying this review.