Volunteering as a Means to an Equal End? The Impact of a Social Justice Function on Intention to Volunteer

In the present study, we combined components of the theory of planned behavior and the functional approach to predict the social sector volunteering intention of nonvolunteers (N = 513). Moreover, we added a new other-oriented “social justice function” to the Volunteer Functions Inventory of Clary and colleagues (1998) Clary, E. G., Snyder, M., Ridge, R., Copeland, J., Stukas, A. A., Haugen, J. and Miene, P. 1998. Understanding and assessing the motivations of volunteers: A functional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74: 1516–1530. [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], which contains mainly self-oriented functions. We distinguished the social justice function from the other five measured volunteer functions in confirmatory factor analysis, and showed its incremental validity in predicting intention to volunteer beyond established constructs such as self-efficacy, subjective norm, and the five volunteer functions. This study suggests that emphasizing potential social justice improvements by means of volunteering may attract new volunteers.