The impact on child developmental status at 12 months of volunteer home-visiting support

Home-visiting support during pregnancy or soon after the birth of an infant can be advantageous for maternal well being and infant development. The best results have been identified when home-visitors are professionals, especially nurses, and if a theoretically driven curriculum is followed with fidelity. Some suggest that disadvantaged families, who may avoid professional services, respond well to support from community volunteers but there is less evidence about their impact. This study identified potentially vulnerable mothers during pregnancy in randomly allocated neighbourhoods where local volunteer home-visiting schemes agreed to offered proactive volunteer support and control areas where the local home-visiting schemes did not offer this proactive service. Taking demographic, child and family factors into account there were no significant differences in infant cognitive development at 12 months of age between families who had been supported by a volunteer and those who had not. Better cognitive development was predicted by less reported parenting stress when infants were 2 months and a more stimulating and responsive home environment at 12 months. The results suggest that unstructured proactive volunteer support for potentially vulnerable families is not likely to enhance infant development. Limitations of the cluster randomised design are discussed

Uncle Sam Wants Whom? The Draft and the Quality of Military Personnel

It has been argued the draft may enable the military to attract more able individuals than a volunteer military and thus increase welfare. We find this may be the case if a volunteer military simply takes the least able individuals. Ignoring the deadweight loss from taxation, when the military tests individuals, does not take the lowest quality applicants, and the test is costless and accurate, neither a random draft nor a draft with testing increases welfare, and both usually decrease welfare. Only if testing is relatively costly or imprecise would a random draft dominate a volunteer military with testing. With either a low quality volunteer military or imprecise testing, a volunteer military is more likely to be preferable to a draft the larger the size of the military. The opposite is the case with either costly testing or deadweight loss from taxation to support the military. Key Words: conscription, volunteer military, testing

The Draft and the Quality of Military Personnel

It has been argued the draft may enable the military to attract more able individuals than a volunteer military, and thus increase welfare. In our theoretical model, we find this may be the case if a volunteer military simply takes the least able individuals. When the military tests individuals and does not take the lowest quality applicants, neither a random draft nor a draft with testing increases welfare, and both usually decrease welfare. Only if testing is relatively costly would a random draft dominate a volunteer military with testing. Key Words:

Health Care and Public Transit; Your Ticket to Health Care Access, 2005

Transportation is an important health care issue. The majority of the population here in Iowa have ready access and typically use private automobiles to access health care and other community services. There is also a significant segment of the population that either does not have access to a personal automobile or is not currently capable of driving. This can potentially limit their access to health care, but it has greater health implications because it can also limit access to nutrition and other community services, as well as involvement in social activities. For people unable to drive themselves, the alternatives generally include reliance on family, friends, volunteer groups, and public transit. Many choose transit because it gives them a degree of independence. Public transit is often used to supplement other options even when they are available. It becomes critical in circumstances where the other options don’t exist. In many cases there may be no family available or they may not always be able to get off work when travel needs arise during the workday. Friends may be in similar circumstances and volunteer groups may be either unavailable or overwhelmed. The fact that many patients depend on public transit to get to and from health care appointments makes it beneficial for health care professionals to get to know more about public transit and how it operates here in Iowa

Volunteering as Othering: Understanding A Paradox of Social Distance, Obligation, and Reciprocity

This article challenges the notion of border crossing through volunteer work, arguing that recent literature on volunteer/service learning tend to assume that difference between volunteers and the community they work in is a given. Based on interviews of volunteers in a college alternative spring break trip in March 2013, this article shows that such difference is socially constructed through the naming of certain work, but not others, as volunteer work. The common interview answer was that volunteer work is something done for people distant from oneself—when one helps family or friends, it is not called volunteer work. Focusing and closely analyzing interviews of three volunteers, this article argues that calling certain work volunteer work is an act of othering the people one is helping as strangers. Advocating acknowledgment of this aspect of labeling volunteer work and seeing the benefit of the work not in border crossing but in re-imagining connections with various individuals, this article discusses ways to overcome the othering aspect of volunteering

教育相談における ボランティア・ヘルパーの意義と活用

It has become a general practice to employ a team approach in providing educational consultation and support in schools. In team support, it is important that all members understand each other\u27s expertise, abilities and that they are clear about how authority will be delegated. Though volunteers have been helpful, there has not been much research into their effectiveness. In this paper, the importance and effectiveness of volunteer helpers are discussed based on the analysis of several case studies of psychoeducational support service helpers. The results show that there are three ways of incorporating volunteer helpers:(a)maintaining an already-established, naturally formed relationship,(b)intentionally employing a volunteer helper when necessary, and(c)having a volunteer helper as a part of a formal support network. In addition, respecting the spirit of volunteerism and making sure the volunteers are not overly-worked or experiencing stress because of the expectations placed upon them is important. Moreover, when volunteer helpers are incorporated as a part of the support structure, care should be taken not to undermine their expertise and authority in support activities

Volunteering, Income Support Programs and Disabled Persons

We study the propensity of disabled persons to engage in volunteer activity with the Participation and Activity Limitation Survey (PALS) -- a unique Canadian dataset which provides extensive information on disabled persons as well as volunteering behaviour. Our principal focus is on the effects of various income support programs on disabled person’s participation in volunteer activities. We find that certain income support programs (e.g., workers’ compensation) are associated with decreases in the probability of volunteering while others (e.g., Pension Plans) are associated with increases in the propensity to volunteer. The reason is that not all income support programs are identical with respect to their implications for unpaid work. There are some – like workers compensation – that embody strong disincentives to volunteering while others like public Pensions that explicitly encourage unpaid work. Our conclusion is that program characteristics can significantly affect volunteering. This conclusion is further supported when we look at other income support programs that embody ambiguous or no incentive effects. As one would anticipate, these ‘incentive neutral’ programs have no significant impact on volunteering. The relevance of these results to both theories of volunteerism and public policy is discussed.Disability, Income Support Programs, Incentive Effects, Volunteer Activity

Understanding collaboration in volunteer computing systems

Volunteer computing is a paradigm in which devices participating in a distributed environment share part of their resources to help others perform their activities. The effectiveness of this computing paradigm depends on the collaboration attitude adopted by the participating devices. Unfortunately for software designers it is not clear how to contribute with local resources to the shared environment without compromising resources that could then be required by the contributors. Therefore, many designers adopt a conservative position when defining the collaboration strategy to be embedded in volunteer computing applications. This position produces an underutilization of the devices’ local resources and reduces the effectiveness of these solutions. This article presents a study that helps designers understand the impact of adopting a particular collaboration attitude to contribute with local resources to the distributed shared environment. The study considers five collaboration strategies, which are analyzed in computing environments with both, abundance and scarcity of resources. The obtained results indicate that collaboration strategies based on effort-based incentives work better than those using contribution-based incentives. These results also show that the use of effort-based incentives does not jeopardize the availability of local resources for the local needs.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Volunteer Engagement and Retention: Their Relationship to Community Service Self-Efficacy

The declining number of U.S. volunteers is troubling, necessitating improved understanding of drivers of volunteer retention such as volunteer engagement. We utilized the job demands-resources model to investigate the moderating role of community service self-efficacy (CSSE) on the relationships between two demands (organizational constraints and role ambiguity) and volunteer engagement. Volunteers (N = 235) from three U.S. nonprofit organizations participated in a survey as part of a volunteer program assessment. Volunteers who encountered greater organizational constraints and role ambiguity were less engaged. In addition, CSSE attenuated the negative relationship between organizational constraints and engagement, but not the negative association between role ambiguity and engagement. When faced with organizational constraints, volunteers with higher CSSE reported greater engagement than those with lower CSSE. Organizations should therefore assess and support volunteers’ CSSE to bolster their engagement when faced with demands. Further recommendations for increasing volunteer engagement are discussed

The role of the volunteer in the mental hospital.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityThe sociological aspects of the role of the volunteer deal with the marginal person who joins an organization in which professionally trained people are also employed. The immediate problem raised is, to what extent can the non-professional volunteer supplement the professional roles within the organization without creating a situation of strain? Or, can a person who is institutionally not expected to be a professional perform a professional function in the technical organization? This is the problem of marginal professionalization: the volunteer stands on the periphery of the social organization because he has not fully adopted the norms of the professional task group. There is yet another reason why the volunteer in the mental hospital is functionally necessary to the technical organization. The volunteer operates in a task group where human problems are dealt with, not things. Again because the volunteer's chief source of status lies outside the hospital, the volunteer provides something to the organization which the regular staff members cannot do. Also, because it is human beings that are dealt with and not things, the role of the volunteer in the mental hospital cannot be explicitly defined. When the task performance deals with such things as specific duties which do not involve a human relationship, the role can be more definitely defined and the strains will be fewer. Where the marginal person must perform a function which is similar to that of the task group and deals with human relationships, the strains can be minimized only insofar as the members of the task group accept the marginal role and re-define their own roles within the organization. [TRUNCATED