Research to Practice seeks to identify, review and interpret academic and other research important to the volunteer engagement field. Because the various reports and studies are discussed in terms of their major relevance to practitioners, each of the articles is also listed in the Engage Library by subject covered.
Engage Library
Research to Practice
This Research to Practice looks at a study of older volunteers and their volunteering profile. It is a study which uses panel data (that is, it tracks the same people over a period of time) between 1996 and 2004. The incorporation of panel data is quite useful, because so often…
April 2008
In this Research to Practice, we look at the latest survey of volunteering for England and Wales, with an emphasis on how volunteers view the organisation of volunteering. This survey, called Helping Out, looks once more at some questions from a 1997 survey. Some of the results…
January 2008
Surveys in different countries show that people often choose to volunteer in the sport and recreation field. During 2006, Sport and Recreation New Zealand (SPARC) commissioned research to look at how to motivate and recruit more volunteers, and successive SPARC studies show how…
October 2007
In a recent report, The National Youth Agency in England explores the skills, knowledge and attitudinal development that young people derive from volunteering. The research did not intend to evaluate volunteering projects in terms of quality or volunteer management. Rather,…
July 2007
GoVolunteer is the recruitment website of Volunteering Australia and is run in partnership with SEEK, an Internet employment website. From the 9th to the 31st of May 2005, a survey was placed on the website with the intention to collect data from people visiting the site.…
July 2006
As the populations of most developed countries show an increasing
proportion of older people, debates have started about how an aging
population will be cared for. For volunteering, this often means how
volunteers will be engaged to help care for the elderly. But this…
April 2007
2005 in the UK was the Year of the Volunteer, with a programme of events designed to increase the profile of volunteering. To build on its legacy, the England Volunteering Development Council, a high-level representative mechanism of volunteering, established The Commission for…
January 2007
One area in which volunteering is important is in helping people who are new, or relatively new, to a country settle and integrate. This is the focus of A Part of Society. The report rightly starts from a position that, although (in the UK at least) we know a great deal about…
October 2006
Do we need another study on volunteer motives? Michael Callow’s work (published in the International Journal of Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Marketing) argues that we do and that there is value in looking at volunteering among retirees. Too often, says Callow, we categorise…
April 2006
This Research to Practice reviews a report on recruiting and retaining volunteers to work with AIDS service organisations. The study findings were developed through a survey of volunteers plus interviews and focus groups with managers of volunteers. The study examined the…
January 2006
This article examines a research report done at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada by Evelina J. Rog, S. Mark Pancer, and Mark C. Baetz: “Corporate Volunteer Programs: Maximising Employee Motivation and Minimizing Barriers to Program Participation.” The…
October 2005
Volunteering is increasingly being recognised as an activity that can promote social inclusion. However, it has been debated (certainly in the UK) how far volunteering is still an exclusive activity benefiting certain sections of society far more than others. We know barriers…
July 2005
Research-to-Practice Editor Steven Howlett re-visits a paper by Colin Rochester published in Voluntary Action, the journal of the Institute for Volunteering Research in 1999, about the management implications for volunteer coordination based on the organisational setting in…
April 2005
This edition of Research-to-Practice looks at three reports that examine corporate employee volunteering. Employee volunteering is an area of considerable growth and of great interest, but how can volunteer-involving organisations and volunteers managers make the most of…
January 2005
When the 1997 National Survey for Volunteering in the UK was published, it appeared to show that young peoples’ regard and enthusiasm for volunteering was in decline. Responding to this, the Institute for Volunteering Research produced the report ‘What Young People Want from…
October 2004
It seems counter-intuitive for most people working in volunteering that such participation should be bad for your health. A new research paper in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health claims just this, flying in the face of much other evidence. Is volunteering bad for…
July 2004
Is Volunteering Rewarding in Itself?
Stephan Meier and Alois Stutzer
Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich
February 2004
Some things said about volunteering seem intuitively right; such as, volunteering can make you happy. Research such as the…
April 2004
The current UK government has often re-iterated that its policy is 'evidence led'. Whether this happens in practice is for others to decide, but a useful spin-off is that research has become more prevalent in areas interesting government.
This Research into Practice focuses on a…
January 2004
This Research to Practice article examines how Five Key Trends and Their Impact on the Voluntary Sector (a feature article in this issue) can be a model for interpreting data in a practical, put-it-to-use way.
The "Five Key Trends..." article is itself an example of translating…
October 2003
Victoria is a fascinating city nestled in the westernmost portion of British Columbia. It is a city which is known for being “more English than the English” and a great place to have afternoon tea in the old style.
You wouldn’t think they’d be producing material on the cutting…
July 2003