A Passion for Service? Motivations for Volunteerism Among First-Year College Students

This study addressed the links between first-year college students' motivations to volunteer, gender, and past volunteering practices. We surveyed 149 first-year students using items from the Volunteer Functions Inventory (Clary et al., 1998). The results of a series of one-way ANOVAs determined significant differences in motivations when comparing gender and prior volunteering experiences. This difference was maximized through a direct discriminant analysis by the desire to volunteer based on humanitarian or altruistic beliefs. These results indicate that female first-year students regardless of their previous service participation and males with prior volunteering experiences showed significantly stronger altruism than did males with limited past volunteering experience. The findings suggest that community service providers and organizers should further differentiate volunteering opportunities by students' prior volunteering experiences rather than their gender to attract a wider population of first-year college students into volunteering commitments.