Sustained Volunteering Of University Students: A Qualitative Study

As one of the world themes in 21 th century, volunteering has attracted more and more to engage in it. And it also showed positive development trend. In a word, volunteering has far beyond one's personal choice, and it gradually assumes more social responsibilities. Nowadays, western scholars have more relevant studies on volunteering, but there are little amounts of research on this topic. Moreover, lots of them tried to analyze volunteering from the institutional and macro perspective. Based on the analysis of literatures in and out of China, the research in this paper will try to answer this research question:"Why university students are willing to volunteer for a long time?". As to theory framework, there are about two different opinions. One of them is mainly proposed by psychologists who are agreed with the Volunteering Process Model. In this model, sustained volunteering, as the consequences of volunteers'volunteering, is significantly connected with the antecedent stage and experience stage. And the conditions of these two stages are directly related to sustained volunteering. In this model, personal motivations and personal satisfaction can affect the consequences stage (sustained volunteering). Another conceptual framework, role identity, is proposed by sociologists. This theory suggested that with sustained volunteering, volunteers will turn the identity of volunteering into themselves. In this theory, researchers conclude that family education, social norms, tasks assigned by volunteer associations will create important effects on the forming of the volunteer role identity. However, after analyzing these two different conceptual frameworks, the researcher has noticed the volunteering process model has realized the influences of personal motivation and satisfaction on sustained volunteering, but it fails to realized the effects of social factors on continued volunteering; Also, researchers who proposed role identity theory focuses on the influences of social factors on sustained volunteering, but they neglect the importance of personal activity. So, this research will try to combine these two different conceptual frameworks together, and will analyze university student volunteers'sustained volunteering from the personal, organizational and social perspective.According to the research question, after comparing the differences between quantitative research methodology and qualitative research methodology, the researcher will employ the qualitative research methodology. About the sampling method, purposive sampling method will be used, and six university students will be chosen from the Youth Volunteering Association at Nanjing University. In the process of data-gathering, the research will mainly use the literature analysis, one-to-one in-depth interview and participant observation. And in order to get comprehensive and objective real facts, categorized analyzing and situational analyzing methods will be employed to analyze the gathered information and data. After in-depth interview with these six university students and participant observations during their volunteering, also literature analyzing, the researcher can analyze university students'volunteer behavior deeply. In a word, university students'volunteering in the Chinese context, it was connected with China's social mobilization, and personal motivation, organizational satisfaction, social norms and political benefits also can affect university student volunteers'volunteer behavior.As a qualitative research, during its application, it is unavoidable that it will have some drawbacks. For example, this research has too few samples, and it may fail to cover all the characteristics. Also, it is the first attempt to do a qualitative research for the research, so under the condition that the research is not fully familiar with this research method. At last, these will hugely affect the objectivity of this research. However, owing to that there are less relevant studies on university students' volunteering, so this study will create some scientific value, and expect to make some contributions to enhance the development of relevant research.