Measuring Motivation to Volunteer in Human Services

Abstract

In this study, 258 volunteers in human services and 104 nonvolunteers were asked to rank in importance 28 motives for volunteering that had been identified in a thorough literature review. According to the literature, most researchers assume that motivation to volunteer (MMV) is a two-or three-dimensional phenomenon, but very few studies have carried out an empirical analysis of the internal dimensionality of MTV. The present findings indicate that when all 28 motives were subjected to various types of factor analysis, most items were grouped together on one factor. In other words, a unidimensional scale was obtained.