On Volunteer Motivations in Emerging Adults: How It Connects to Generalized Self-Efficacy?

Adrianisa Kamila Shabrina¹* and Sugiarti Musabiq²

^aFaculty of Psychology, University of Indonesia, Depok, Indonesia; ^bFaculty of Psychology, University of Indonesia, Depok

*e-mail: adrianisa.kamila@gmail.com

On Volunteer Motivations in Emerging Adults: How It Connects to Generalized Self-Efficacy?

Background. Based on a survey conducted by Indorelawan.org, Indonesia has a lot of emerging adult (18-29 years old) volunteers. Being a volunteer in emerging adult stage means they have to face a lot of challenges and tasks, since emerging adult is a phase with a lot of developmental tasks like starting family, pursuing careers, or pursuing higher education. Beside from those developmental tasks, an emerging adult volunteer also needs to do the volunteering tasks. Volunteering tasks are often not an easy task to do as volunteers has to give treatments for people, being located at remote places, and many more. When an emerging adult decides to do volunteering, they need to consider both of their developmental tasks and also their volunteering tasks.

Behind someone’s decision to volunteer, there are certain reasons or motivations that are deemed important for the volunteer. There are 6 (six) dimensions of volunteer motivation: protective motives, values, career, social, understanding, and enhancement. Someone may volunteer to get social networks, further up their careers, or as a medium for self-actualization, and they believe that they would fulfill their goals along with fulfilling both volunteering tasks and developmental tasks. The self-affirming beliefs that they could do well in both volunteering tasks and developmental task could fall into the category of generalized self-efficacy. Having high generalized self-efficacy is important for volunteers because it could prepare them and give confidence to face the tasks and challenges while lack of generalized self-efficacy could cause them to doubt themselves and feel burdened by the amount of tasks. Different volunteering motivations might be associated with various levels of generalized self-efficacy. Based on this, author is interested to see the connection between volunteering motivations and generalized self-efficacy.

Methods. Participants were 1954 Indonesian citizens (male = 670, female = 1280, others = 2) aged 18-29 years old who are volunteers or had done volunteering activities in the past. Most participants are women, aged 18-21 years, graduated from high schools or vocational schools, and lived in Java. Based on the experience of volunteering activities, most of the participants conducted the last volunteer activities for 1-12 months, for 1-9 hours, and involved in 1-3 volunteer organizations/activities before the last volunteering activity they did. Volunteer motivation was measured using six-dimensional Volunteer Functions Inventory (VFI) and generalized self-efficacy was measured using the uni-dimensional New Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale (NGSES). To see the relationship between volunteer motivations and generalized self-efficacy, the gathered data was analyzed with partial correlation method. Descriptive analysis was also conducted to see the demographics of the participants.

Results of this study show that there is a negative correlation between generalized self-efficacy and protective motives (r= - 0,01; p>0,05), positive correlations between social motives (r=0,04, p>0,05) and enhancement motives (r=0,06; p=0,05) and significant positive correlations between values motives (r=0,12; p<0,05) career motives (r=0,07; p<0,01) and understanding motives (r=0,15; p<0,05) with the understanding motives having the highest significant correlation.

Conclusions. Six volunteer motivations relate differently to generalized self-efficacy. People who volunteer to protect themselves from unpleasant things are more likely to have lower generalized self-efficacy, meanwhile people who volunteer for social, enhancement, values, and career motives are more likely to have higher generalized self-efficacy.

Added-Values. Volunteering organization could use this study as a basis of their initial screening test. By knowing about their applicants’ motivation for volunteer, organization could use the data to set up suitable training programs for their volunteer. Suitable training and human resources development programs could raise or maintain the volunteers’ generalized self-efficacy and minimize volunteer burnouts.

Keywords: emerging adult, generalized self-efficacy, volunteer, volunteer motivations

Word Count: 581