Modelling the decision to volunteer in organised sports

Highlights

•	The first aim was to identify determinants of volunteering.
•	The second aim was to identify drivers of and time committed to the volunteering.
•	Drivers of volunteering were male gender and number of engagements.
•	Key determinants for time were club membership and number of voluntary engagements.

Abstract

Using a heterodox economic approach, the purpose of this paper is twofold: to analyse the determinants of (1) volunteering in organised sports, and (2) time committed to that volunteering. By means of regression analysis of secondary data from a nation-wide volunteer survey with two waves (2004: n = 15,000; 2009: n = 20,005), it was established that human capital, female gender and the motive of shaping society had a negative influence on the decision to volunteer while the number of engagements in other volunteering had a positive effect. Time committed to volunteering was determined by male gender, having children, meeting people, club membership, shaping society and number of voluntary engagements. The volunteer workforce is thus very heterogeneous; however, sport club managers should recruit volunteers in particular amongst existing members.

Keywords:

• Volunteering
• Time
• Commitment
• Sport club
• Decision-making

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Federal Ministry for Family, Seniors, Women and Youth of the Federal Republic of Germany for the permission to use the data of the ‘Freiwilligensurvey’ [Volunteer survey] and the GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and Data Archive for the Social Sciences (DAS) Germany for providing the data sets. In addition, the author would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their valuable comments and recommendations.

Notes

1 The notation next to the hypotheses refers to the two different models. M1 stands for the model using volunteering as dependent variable and M2 stands for the model which using time committed to the voluntary activity as dependent variable.

2 Data were also collected in 1999 (n = 14,922), yet it was not possible to find an adequate solution due to model specification errors. Therefore this data set was omitted.

3 Previous research in sport using this data source is scant and seems to have focused on descriptive analysis (e.g., Braun, 2011; Rittner, Keiner, & Keiner, 2006).

4 Information in this section was derived from the reports of each survey made available by the German Federal Ministry for Family, Seniors, Women, and Youth.