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Research on Volunteerism...What Needs
to Be Done
By Susan J. Ellis
From Journal of Voluntary Action Research, Volume 14, Number 2-3, April-September 1985, pages 11-14. Originally presented at the Symposium at the 1984 AVAS Conference
Author's note: Read this article in historical
perspective and note which research topics are still untouched
over fifteen years later.
One way to describe the needs for research in volunteerism
is to say that everything is left to do. As a professional field,
volunteer program management is less than 20 years old. While
volunteers have been around since the days of the Mayflower,
formal volunteer programs with trained leadership are a recent
development. Volunteers themselves have largely been taken for
granted. It is a new phenomenon to consider them a subject worthy
of study. This is compounded by the fact that until only a few
years ago, no academic major, either at the bachelor or advanced
degree level, offered students courses in volunteer program
management. Therefore, the subject was not even considered for
serious attention.
In the past few years, however, some students and faculty have
begun to show interest in questions related to the field of
volunteerism. They are finding it difficult (if not impossible)
to locate data with which to work and are beginning to recognize
that information of the most elemental sort must first be uncovered
for centralization of existing research, or--at a minimum--agreed-upon
taxonomies for indexing/abstracting purposes. There are many
unpublished master's and doctoral-level theses on university
library shelves that are not being disseminated to serious volunteerism
researchers. We need to bring this basic research out into the
volunteerism forums.
It is important to use the terms volunteerism and voluntarism
correctly, and not to confuse activities that utilize volunteers
with general concerns of the "voluntary sector," much
of which has nothing to do with "volunteers." In the
same vein, the study of volunteering in relation to government
agencies should not be confused with issues affecting nonprofit
agencies only.
New Research Horizons
The following is a list of subjects that either have not been
studied at all or deserve far more attention. The list represents
personal brainstorming, and topics are presented in no particular
order. I make no claim that the list is complete; however, I
have grouped the topics for easier discussion.
- Who Volunteers: Despite the growing amount of literature
about volunteers, the truth is that very little has kinds
of volunteer work. Studies tend to lump categories of volunteers
together into large aggregates that do not illuminate possible
important differences in patterns of volunteering among various
populations. It is my contention that until we have clearly
described who volunteers for what, we cannot move on to more
in-depth studies of other issues relating to volunteers. We
need to build on a firmer foundation of knowledge about volunteering
than we presently have.
- Study a wide range of organizations such as courts, museums,
sports groups, crisis centers, tenants unions, etc., and analyze
the racial/economic/educational characteristics of volunteers.
This not only would give a more realistic sense of who volunteers,
but also would show which types of organizations benefit from
the widest diversity of volunteers.
- Study all-volunteer groups (those not connected to any institution
but operating independently) to see who belongs.
- Do an in-depth study of black volunteerism: What vocabulary
do blacks of various income levels use to describe their helping
patterns? What types of organizations attract blacks? Do educated
blacks tend to follow white volunteer patterns? Are government-related
volunteer programs unappealing to black volunteers, and if
so, why?
- Do the same in-depth study with Asian volunteers, both
Orientals who are second generation and newly-arrived immigrants
or refugees.
- Do the same study with Native American volunteers (a big
category which probably should itself be subdivided into
Eskimo, Indian, etc.).
- Do the same study with Hispanic volunteers (again, perhaps
some subdivisions would be revealing, such as Puerto Ricans
vs. Cubans vs. South Americans, or refugees vs. voluntary
immigrants).
- Do the same study with low-income volunteers, across racial
or ethnic lines. Some of the same questions might be fascinating
to answer for upper-income volunteers, too.
- One long-unrecognized subject is that of the independent,
individual volunteer--the person who crusades for a particular
cause or provides some sort of community assistance without
affiliating with a group to do so. Who are these people? How
many are there? (Ivan Scheier has been urging our field to
consider this subject for some time.)
- On the subject of men and women doing volunteer work, what
is really needed is a study of whether the types of volunteering
done by both groups is changing (which implies that we know
what the history of both groups has been). Are there more
women in policy-making roles now? Are more men doing direct
service work? Why or why not?
SPECIAL MOTIVATION ISSUES
- What happens when volunteers have been with an organization
for a long time, especially on the board of directors? What
special type of "vested interest" (if any) replaces
the usual objectivity we assign to volunteer involvement?
- Is there evidence that people volunteer as adults in gratitude
for help given to them as children by other adult volunteers?
For example, do people become troop leaders or Big Brothers/Sisters
because they were scouts or Little Brothers/Sisters when young?
This "repaying a debt" can also be studied in terms
of volunteering for any organization that helped a person
or a family in the recent past.
- Is there actually some measurable difference between the
motivation and/or effectiveness of student volunteers vs.
any other type of volunteer? Or, between students who receive
academic credit for their service vs. students who are "pure"
volunteers?
- What is the effect of giving money--in any quantity--on
volunteering? Is it more than an "enabling" factor?
Does it provide recognition? Is it received as a form of "earnings
by the volunteer and/or is it seen as such by the salaried
staff? When do "enabling funds" become a "stipend"
and when does a "stipend" become a "salary,"
and does the level of money involved affect the volunteer
work provided?
- How about a study of the motivation differences between
volunteers arid salaried staff? (Compare the two groups on
the basis of genuinely comparable work assigned.)
- Does volunteering as a student introduce men to "new"
types of volunteer work, especially direct service? And does
this introduction lead to continued volunteering in such roles
later in life?
- What happens to the dynamics of a situation when a volunteer
is hired to become part of staff? Or when a salaried staff
member chooses to leave the job and volunteer in the agency
instead (retirement, maternity leave, etc.)? What do such
changes imply for the broader picture of acceptance of volunteers?
- In regard to the preceding subject, why is it that in many
cases an agency makes a specific decision not to consider
present volunteers for job openings? What are the pro and
con effects on volunteers and on salaried staff of such a
decision? Can data be developed for how often volunteers are
indeed hired by the organizations for which they volunteered?
Overview Subjects
- Israel and England are the only two countries about which
more than a few lines have been written regarding volunteer
involvement. This leaves the rest of the world, and even the
rest of Great Britain.
- History also remains untouched. The book I co-authored in
1978, By the People: A History of Americans as Volunteers,
remains the ONLY book devoted exclusively to the history of
volunteers in this country. There is room for more overview
history and for some specific studies of the development of
volunteering in particular fields/geographic regions/special
causes.
- An examination of who is a "director of volunteers."
The people who carry responsibility for recruiting and working
with volunteers do not always have a job title reflecting
that assignment. How many people really do head volunteer
programs? How many do so part-time? Full-time? What other
titles exist? Where do professions such as "clergy"
or "political campaign manager" fit into the overall
picture of volunteer administration?
Organization-Related
- Develop some tools for effective screening out of "inappropriate"
volunteers, especially those being referred for therapeutic
reasons. Or tools for finding the right assignment for hard-to-place
volunteers (other than the usual vocational counseling aids).
- Legal issues have hardly been touched except for general
discussions of insurance and liability. What lawsuits have
involved volunteers, and what are their implications to programs
and to other volunteers?
- What are examples of true collaboration between volunteer
programs?
- Develop tools to measure the effectiveness of volunteers
in terms of the many assignments that ask volunteers to affect
the "quality of life" of clients (homebound visitation,
victim assistance, etc.).
- Have agencies adapted to the needs of employed volunteers?
Are there new assignments on weekends or during the evening?
Are short-term assignments being developed successfully?
- Eva Schindler-Rainman has been focusing recently on what
she calls "transitional volunteers," people who
have undergone major life changes, employment changes, or
therapeutic treatment and who need volunteer work to move
from one stage of life to another. How prevalent is this type
of volunteer? What impact does this type of volunteer have
on an agency? Are agencies able to cope with the possible
special concerns of such volunteers? Is volunteering really
a successful transitioning tool?
Other Categories
- Can job-related skill development through volunteering be
documented, particularly in terms of retraining of unemployed
people, resulting in new employment?
- What do VACs (Voluntary Action Centers) accomplish? Do a
comparison of VACs to find effective models. Do a study of
what communities may need from VACs that they are not now
receiving. What happens in communities without a VAC?
- Are there enough similarities or common interests among
volunteers to warrant the formation of state or national associations
of volunteers? Conferences for volunteers? This is connected
to the expectation that volunteers, as a generic group, can
be mobilized to advocate for issues affecting them, such as
mileage deductions, etc.
- Does community volunteering by employees benefit the corporation
supporting such volunteering? How, exactly? Is morale improved?
Are skills learned in the community transferable to the profit-making
world? Does this change if the volunteering is done on company
work-release time vs. on the employee's personal time?
- Ivan Scheier has spoken of the "volunteerization of
the workplace," meaning that the techniques of motivating
people other than through a paycheck are increasingly being
discussed by employers concerned about "productivity"
and "quality control." What indeed is the correlation
between volunteer work and salaried work in terms of motivation
and/or supervision techniques that can be adapted from the
volunteer world to the business world?
- What is the dollar value of unreported in-kind and volunteer
support for nonprofit organizations? Why are so many national
organizations reluctant to report these values in their annual
financial statements? What unreported support is being given
to professional associations by nonprofits/government agencies
through: assumption of mailing costs, long distance phone
calls, office supplies, and especially staff time?
- Do "civic groups" consider themselves volunteers
in the traditional sense (Kiwanis, Lions, Rotary, etc,)? Does
this impact on male/female issues in volunteering?
- Have any agencies cut their budgets and "substituted"
volunteers for paid staff? What has happened?
Summary
Volunteerism is a fertile field for research. Not only are
the subjects above of academic interest, they are also of immediate
usefulness to practitioners in volunteer programs. It is not
going to be easy to develop research designs to tackle the topics
listed because documentation is often nonexistent for many volunteer
activities. This is changing, however, as record keeping becomes
more developed for volunteer programs. I urge researchers to
consider going beyond the ordinary to study volunteerism. The
potential rewards are many.
For books on this topic in our bookstore,
click the
link(s) below:
Research
Back to Library Index
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Permission is granted for organizations to download and reprint this article. Reprints must provide full acknowledgment of source, as provided:
Excerpted from From Journal
of Voluntary Action Research, Volume 14, Number 2-3, April-September
1985, pages 11-14. Originally presented at the Symposium
at the 1984 AVAS Conference .
Found in the Energize website library at: http://www.energizeinc.com/art.html
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