Abstract of Motivations of Hungarian Volunteers – an assessment of the standardising survey of the Hungarian Volunteer Motivation Inventory
Our research seeks to continue the new international trends of assessing the motivational factors of volunteers. On the one hand, this study has based on a multifactorial (15 factors in 59 Likert scale questions) inventory. On the other, we carried out a large sample size (n=3000) survey of volunteers engaged in different activities and constituting – from an organisational perspective – a representative sample of the volunteer population. Our underlining aim was to assess both primary motivations that are important for the maintenance of volunteering, and background motivations that indicate the dynamics beyond the volunteer engagement process of the person. At the same time, we sought to standardise an inventory of motivations that could be gainfully in volunteer management, crucially contributing towards the more efficient recruitment, deployment and tasking of volunteers. Regarding the primary motivations, our findings highlights that Hungarian volunteering is strongly values-based, although less motivated by social norms and not at all by religious/spiritual conviction. Among the background motivations, the joy of volunteering, the need for community and adherence to values has been significant. This shows that values-based action by Hungarian volunteers primarily attached to a social cause and/or group, which triggers the altruistic, helping conduct of a volunteer. We further find that in volunteer management, the crucial demographic factor determining motivations is age, while we were also able to distinguish groups guided by activity, social values and community motivations.
Keywords: volunteer motivation, primray motivations, background motivations, volunteer motivation inventory, voluntary management
Anna Mária Bartal – Zoltán Kmetty
Civil Szemle 2011., 4. 7-30.



