"Why am i a volunteer?": building a quantitative scale

• Main Authors: Carlos Eduardo Cavalcante, Washington José de Souza, Leandro Trigueiro Fernandes, Clarisse Lorena Barreto Cortez
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
• Series: REAd: Revista Eletrônica de Administração
• Subjects: Motivation; Volunteer Work; Instrument Validity
• Online Access: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1413-23112013000300002&lng=en&tlng=en

This paper aims to analyze the validity of a quantitative instrument to identify what attracts someone to volunteer work, as well as what makes them stay and what makes them quit such an activity. The theoretical framework lists aspects related to volunteer work, which is followed by a discussion on models of analysis of volunteer motivation. As to the objectives, this research is descriptive, since it presents the analysis of the validity of a quantitative instrument that seeks to understand and describe the reasons for volunteering at the Pastoral da Criança, a Brazilian NGO. This instrument is based on theoretical ideas by Souza, Medeiros and Fernandes (2006). Reliability - Cronbach's Alpha - reached values between 0.7 and 0.8. Regarding Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy a good index was also obtained: 0.74. Despite the good results of reliability and sampling adequacy of factor analysis, none of the variables resulted in the expected combination, namely: indicators versus profile. It is necessary to improve the semantic meaning of certain factors, or even increase the number of indicators so as to generate additional correlations among them.