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It's Wednesday and I'm in Sheffield
in my continuing search for prestigious international conferences.
This (particular one) is the LSA Research Conference on Volunteers
in Sport, hosted by Geoff Nichols, Peter Taylor and Matthew
James at Sheffield University. Although the voluntary sector
is all too often overlooked by leisure studies, the final presentation
of the day reminded us that Davis Smith (I think in work done
for the Rowntree Foundation) had concluded that sport accounts
for the largest single element of volunteering in the UK.
Brian Wilson started things off with a presentation
based on his PhD research at Surrey when he used logistical regression
to model the decision of volunteers to enter the athletics coach
education programme. Brian spared us the intricate details of
the mathematical modelling, concentrating instead on the conceptual
background, the empirical base and the findings. Deciding that
expectancy theory was virtually untestable he turned to a social
exchange model. He used signing-up for an NGB course as an unambiguous
measure of volunteering and did 112 interviews across two athletics
clubs, introducing some qualitative data alongside the quantitative.
The qualitative data told a rather sorry story with the volunteers
expressing feelings of being isolated and unwanted, treated as
though they were child minders. The mathematical model indicated
that there was a missing variable and Brian speculated that this
might have been social class, which he had felt unable to include
because it was co-related with other key variables.
The Sheffield team (Geoff
Nichols, Peter Taylor and Matthew James) then presented their
project that is updating the 1995/6 survey of volunteers in sport.
The current survey additionally contains questions about the
Volunteer Investment Programme which had been introduced following
the finding of the earlier survey that volunteers felt they were
left in post longer than they wanted because of poor recruitment
and retention. The research team has also tried to remove the
double counting that happened in the first survey as a result
of including the same people at different levels of their sport's
organisation. At national governing body level there has been
an overall reduction in both the number of volunteers (which
would have been much greater, but for a massive increase of 578%
in gymnastics) and the number of hours. This is at least partly
attributable to the previous double counting, but may also reflect
more efficient structures within the NGBs.
Rita Ralston presented the survey she had been doing
with Les Lumsdon among the volunteers at the Commonwealth
Games. As the findings have not yet been reported to the partners
(Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Sport, Manchester 2002)
this was largely about the highs and lows of conducting the research.
A sample of 1,300 was selected, from which 698 useable replies
were received. The questionnaire was supplemented by focus groups
involving 72, of whom 46 provided diary comments. Most of the
respondents had volunteered on their own rather than in groups,
and were somewhat taken aback to find that there was no attempt
to match their skills to the jobs they were asked to do. The
major pluses were the boost to civic pride and the comradeship
among the volunteers.
Richard Garrett (Leisure Industries Research Centre)
discussed four case studies from his PhD on the reaction of voluntary
sports clubs to the award of Lottery Funding. These represented
a range from those that complied with the terms and principles
of the Sports Lottery Board to those who resisted despite the
award of their grant. He had done a telephone survey of the secretaries
of 100 sports clubs awarded funding in 1996, followed by two
case studies from each of cricket, tennis and football. These
were set within the context of institutional theory and response
to social pressures. The case studies served to demonstrate issues
of compliance, (lack of) accountability and coincidence of values
and aspirations.
Overall there was no shortage of questions and discussion at
any stage of the day and I got the feeling that most people wished
that they had known earlier what other researchers were doing
in this still under-developed field. Reflecting on our own respondents,
I think that rarely do they make a conscious calculation of costs
and benefits when they decide to volunteer, but they do subsequently
often construct rules of procedure.
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