The Sports Development Potential of Sports Event Volunteering: Insights from the XVII Manchester Commonwealth Games

Abstract

The sports development implications of investment in major sports events are not well researched, in contrast to an examination of the economic impacts of events. A sample of volunteers at the XVII Manchester Commonwealth is explored to identify how experience of volunteering at a major sports event affects interest, participation and subsequent volunteering in sport, and also volunteering in non-sport contexts. Factor analysis is employed to summarize volunteer experiences, and then regression analysis, which controls for differences in the sports and socio-economic characteristics. While there is some evidence that volunteering at a major event can raise interest, participation and volunteering in sport generally, capitalizing upon this will require focusing efforts on particular triggers for change. There appears to be much stronger potential opportunity to generate wider social capital than necessarily produce changes associated with sport.

Notes

1. This research was funded by UK Sport. The paper has benefited from feedback from presentations at the European Association of Sports Management Conference in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, held in September 2005, a seminar to the Faculty of Sport, Health and Exercise at Staffordshire University in November 2005, discussion with colleagues at Loughborough, and comments from Holger Preuss and anonymous referees.

2. The research also investigated volunteer expectations in a questionnaire issued to the same respondents prior to the Games. More detail on the results concerning the expectations of volunteering are available in the papers Ralston et al. 2004; Downward and Ralston 2005, and Downward et al. 2005. A more general overview of other elements of the research project is obtainable from UK Sport at www.uksport.gov.uk/

3. The dependent variables’ scales were thus treated as essentially ordinal rather than interval magnitudes. The factor analysis was conducted on SPSS version 12, and the regression analysis on STATA SE version 8.

4. With the multiple categories implied in the series of nominal variables Age 1 to 4 and Emp 1 to 4, Age1 and Emp1 were excluded from the analysis to avoid the ‘dummy variable trap’.

5. While statistical significance is always connected to sample size, comparisons across models on broadly the same number of observations is meaningful. Moreover, in applied research statistics can only have intrinsic meaning in connection to the variables used and implied theoretical motivation for using them.

6. A full set of results for the regressions and factor analysis are available from the author on request.

7. However, as Burgham and Downward (2005) note, this may involve some compromise with a traditional volunteering ethos.