Key points are not available for this paper at this time.
Community volunteers provide assistance to a wide variety of client popula-tions. Indeed, without the efforts of these individuals, many services, particularly those in the mental health field, would be greatly reduced or become unavailable altogether (Carter, 1975). An examination of the deter-minants of this altruistic behavior, therefore, is of practical significance, as well as theoretical import. Why do community mental health volunteers devote the time they do to helping others? No doubt there are numerous factors, both situational and dis-positional. A number of investigators have tried to determine whether the personalities of volunteers were in any way different from those of non-volunteers. The research strategy has been a direct one. A group of volun-teers is given a variety of paper-and-pencil personality tests and their scores are compared with those of a group of nonvolunteers. Many investigators have hypothesized, either directly or indirectly, that community volunteers are more empathic, self-efficacious, emotionally stable, have higher internalized
Allen et al. (Sat,) studied this question.