Women’s Motivation In Community Volunteerism

Community volunteering is one of the main venues for women’s community participation.The current research on women’s participation motivation in community volunteering suffers from a lack of gender essentialization and fails to investigate the types and transformations of women’s participation motivation in depth through the perspectives of service process and group differences.In order to fill this research gap,this paper uses the theoretical perspective of service process and life course to interview16 female volunteers,3 male volunteers and 3 community workers in X community of Xiamen.The study found that: first,women’s initial motivation to participate in community volunteerism was divided into four main types,including ambiguous motivation,endogenous self-interest motivation,endogenous altruistic motivation,and exogenous self-interest motivation.Secondly,women in different life courses have different motivational changes in the process of volunteering.The vague motivation of unmarried women becomes clear and self-interested as the service process progresses.Married women’s motivation shifts in two directions: the first one is from the exogenous selfish motivation of "for work" to the endogenous altruistic motivation of "for children",the second one is from the endogenous altruistic motivation of "for children" shifts to the endogenous self-interest motivation of "for themselves";retired women shift from the endogenous self-interest motivation of "for themselves" to the endogenous altruistic motivation of "for everyone".Third,the external incentives that lead to the change of motivation for community volunteering differ among different groups of women.The external motivating factor for unmarried women is the effective feedback from service recipients;for married women,the external motivating factor is the recognition and support from family members;for retired women,the external motivating factor is the sisterhood gained from being embedded in the service team.Since there are differences in the motivation of women at different life course stages in the process of volunteering,this paper suggests that social workers can improve the design of volunteering services according to the differences in the process of volunteering,and enhance the intrinsic motivation and external motivation of volunteering services according to women volunteers at different life course stages.