Volunteer Work Essay

Situations and experiences in our social and physical settings impact on our behaviour and motivate our actions and mood (Bandura,1986). This implies that people engage in different activities in the community due to different motivations and the affects are experienced differently in the way we live and interact with each other (Aguilera, 1998).

Therefore, this section will present theories that will be used to understand the volunteers perceptions, experiences and how volunteer work impacts them. Since the concept of volunteer is dynamic in its interpretation in different contexts of the voluntary sector in different national and social policy areas (Milligan, 2009), there was no particular theory found that explained explicitly the key

People in the society tend to attach positive evaluations to the groups they belong or feel attached to than the groups they do not have any relationship with. These positive attachments or groups are very significant among people as a human need and they create a sense of social identity, belongingness, pride, self concept and high esteem among the individuals to the social world. Tajfel further adds that in order for people to build on their self image, enhancement of the status of the group is needed. For example if we decide that Sweden is the best country, we will try increase this image by denoucing or discriminating against other countries that we do not belong to. The hypothesis in this theory is that members of a specific group will seek to get negative sides of the other groups they do not belong to inorder to enhance their own self image. Tajfel (1979) proposes that categorising people comes from a normal cognitive process (tendency we have) and by doing this, we are creating differences and similarities in different groups. He further illustrates the process with a diagram as

Social Cognitive Theory.

This theory was developed by Bandura (1986) which provides a framework for understanding, predicting and changing human behavior (Ormrod, 2012). According to Bandura (1986), behavior of individuals is shaped by the behavior, personal factors and the environment which he referred to as ‘the triad determinants’. He adds that these three determinants influence each other hence shaping how people behave.

The general principles in this theory are; people learn by observing other people’s behavior, learning is an internal behavior which may or may not lead to a behavior, during the learning process, people need to be motivated as well for an action to happen, people set goals for themselves depending on what they have observed from others and lastly, people are able to control their actions depending on the consequences that they have observed from others (Bandura, 1986). Stone (2000:4) in his book states that the core at Banduras cognitive theory is modeling that teaches new behaviors both negative and positive implying that ‘people are products and producers of their environment’