Why Volunteer? Understanding Motivations For Student Volunteering

ABSTRACT

The profile of volunteering in English Higher Education [HE] has been enhanced in recent years through various initiatives that have not only funded activities, but have sought to expand the range of volunteering opportunities available to students and recognise the contribution that volunteering can make to students' employability. This expansion has also brought about emergent interest in understanding the conditions of student volunteering, in particular why students volunteer and what they seek to achieve through their involvement. This paper adds to this growing literature on indentifying student motivations through analysis of both survey and interview data on student volunteering. The use of mixed methods allows for a detailed interrogation of motivations and how students make sense of their own experiences with respect to dominant discourses about what volunteering can achieve. In particular the paper argues that students are reflective about why they volunteer, their motives can change over time and that for many students volunteering is not necessarily part of a strategic goal to enhance CVs or even ‘do good’.

Keywords:

• higher education student volunteering
• employability in higher education
• motivation for student volunteering
• student reflection and changing motivation

Acknowledgements

The survey data are taken from a project run in collaboration with the Institute for Volunteering Research and funded by the National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE). This research project formed part of the NCCPE's vinspired students programme, which was funded by v, the national young volunteers service, in order to provide evidence of the benefits of volunteering for students, universities and communities. The author wishes to thank NCCPE for permission to use the survey data and to all the student respondents for taking part in the research.

Notes

¹ Futuretrack is a multi-stage survey of applicants who made an application for a full-time place in a UK Higher Education Institution (HEI) at the undergraduate level in 2006. Students were surveyed for a second time in summer and autumn 2007 to record their experiences of their first year at university or college. Holdsworth's analysis of student volunteering was carried out with respondents to wave two of the survey who were full-time students at UK HEIs enrolled on an undergraduate degree programme. This gave a sample size of 33,303 undergraduate respondents. The volunteering rate of 15.3 per cent was obtained from responses to a question asking if students had volunteered to work with a charity during their first year.