July AL!VE Academy: A Person-and-Situation Approach to Skills-Based Volunteering: Lessons From the Psychology of Volunteerism with Joshua Braverman Ph.D. - Tuesday, July 15th, 2025 @ 12:30 PM - 90 minutes
Many people are familiar with the “typical” forms of volunteerism where people receive training or orientation after signing up for the volunteer opportunity. The present dissertation focused on Skills-Based-Volunteerism, where volunteers use their pre-existing skills or talents to volunteer. As Skills-Based Volunteers may have a larger impact within their organization(s), it is important to understand how different they are from Non-Skills-Based Volunteers. Using the Current Population Survey (United States Census Bureau, 2017), Study One examined the characteristics of Skills-Based Volunteers, and the ways that they differ from Non-Skills Based Volunteers. Study One found that Skills-Based Volunteers reported more frequent volunteering (and doing so for more hours) and were more involved with a diverse subset of other prosocial behaviors (e.g., voting, attending community meetings, and working with one’s neighbors to improve their community) than were Non-Skills-Based Volunteers. In Studies Two and Three, I collected original data to understand whether considering the Skills-Oriented nature of volunteerism may lead to divergence from the findings from the existing psychology of volunteering, specifically whether the psychological characteristics known to predict volunteerism extend to Skills-Based Volunteerism. In Study Two, I found that for the most part, the psychological constructs known to predict volunteerism (e.g., personality, motivations, and social norms) tended to function similarly for Skills-Based and Non-Skills-Based Volunteering. In a follow-up survey, Study Three extended this result by finding that the psychological constructs also predict future volunteerism similarly for Skills-Based and Non-Skills-Based Volunteering (three to six months later). Overall, this program of research made it clear that the existing psychology of volunteering does extend to Skills-Based-Volunteering. Volunteer managers can use the present research as evidence to apply existing volunteer management practices to Skills-Based Volunteering. However, future research should continue to investigate whether there are novel psychological characteristics relevant to Skills-Based Volunteering, especially surrounding one’s education, profession, and/or workplace.
| 7/15/2025 |    |