Forschungsprojekt ::

Volunteers and Non-Volunteers: Social justice cognitions and engagement in voluntary work activity

Projektbeschreibung

It stands to reason that in times of a crisis stemming from economic hardship, themes of justice gain exorbitant relevance to the public. To this day, the financial crisis has produced numerous articles on themes of justice and work related topics. The distributions of salaries with regard to bonus payments, the loss of jobs mainly in the lower sectors of companies have gained significant attention by journalists, essayists and philosophers. Suggested alternatives to the capitalistic system in the shape of different cultural impulses like for instance a guaranteed income or regional currencies show that there are tenden-cies in society – globally as well as regionally – reflecting the wish of citizens for reformation with regard to justice and work issues. The project we propose tackles both justice issues and volunteering as an activity influenced and characterized by a different and innovative attitude towards work.

Although themes of justice and prosocial behavior have a long research tradition, the literature on the influence of justice perceptions on sustained prosocial behavior is rather moderate (cf. Batson, 1996; Bierhoff, 2002). The focus of the proposed project is on volunteering as a planned, sustained form of helping behavior and does not encounter issues regarding spontaneous helping behavior determined by situational variables. Our theoretical framework integrates different established approaches and ad-dresses the issue of justice perceptions and their relation to the willingness or unwillingness to volunteer. The following attributes qualify our project:
- Applying the reasoned action approach (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010) and augmenting it with emotional variables.
- Investigating the explained variance of sustained person- and object-related helping behavior in the social sector by justice cognitions, dispositions and judgments in comparison to the established antecedents volunteer functions and norm- as well as control-related cognitions.
- Moving beyond the dichotomy of altruism vs. egoism as sole motives of prosocial activity and revealing the complex moral motive of justice.
- Building on a definition of prosocial behavior as a sustained, organized form of behavior that could possibly be remunerated.
- Applying extracts of a justice research instrument that has been developed considering the German speaking cultural background and drawing on models of organizational psychology to broaden the perspective of social psychology.

The proposed project focuses on a sample of volunteers in the social sector, as well as non-volunteers in Switzerland and Germany, to allow for different multilevel analyses. A cross-sectional approach is applied to test correlation and regression hypotheses. Prior to that, a pretest as well as validity and reliability analyses will be conducted in order to edge the research tool.