Humanitarian aid involvement factors among IMARET volunteers

Abstract

In many domains, core activities of people’s lives would be disrupted if volunteers were not present to provide much-needed help especially medical-based mobile clinics that rely heavily on the labour of volunteers. This study was designed to identify the factors related to humanitarian aid involvement of volunteers, to discover the background of volunteers attending Islamic Medical Association of Malaysia (IMAM) Response and Relief Team (IMARET) mobile clinic and outreach mission and to determine the association between the humanitarian aid involvement factors and the background of volunteers. This cross-sectional study used Volunteer Function Inventory (VFI) scale to measure the motivation factors of volunteers and total of 178 volunteers were recruited. Among the six motivation factors such as values, protective, understanding, enhancement, security and social factors being studied, understanding factor was found out to be the highest factor that motivated the volunteers. Based on the Fisher’s Exact Test, the motivation factors were found to have no association with the demographic data of volunteers. This study suggests that non-profit organisations should be aware that people joining volunteering or humanitarian aid work were not influenced by their sociodemographic characteristics.