Personal characteristics of the college volunteer

Abstract

Tile research findings with regard to the personality traits of undergraduate volunteer mental health workers indicate that they were more nurturant and sensitive toward others than nonvolunteers (Chinsky, 1969). Such personality traits have been associated with therapeutic helping (Carkhuff & Truax, 1966). Volunteers were also found to be more prosocially oriented than nonvolunteers and more tolerant toward client populations (Cowen, Zax, & Laird, 1966). But other investigators have observed that volunteers were less morally tolerant than nonvolunteers (Holzberg, Gewirtz, & Ebner, 1964), and did not differ from nonvolunteers in self-acceptance (Holzberg et al., 1964) and prosocial attitudes (Chinsky, 1969; Gelineau & Kantor, 1969). Following the experience of working with client populations, undergraduate volunteers have been found to increase on variables such as empathy (Chinsky, 1969) and self-acceptance (Cowen et al., 1966; Holzberg et al., 1964). In several studies in which volunteers worked with children, they showed attitude changes in the direction of more positive regard for the client (Chinsky, 1969; Cowen et al., 1966). The two major goals of this study were (a) to compare the personality and attitudes of undergraduate volunteer mental health workers with those of nonvolunteers in order to determine if a more purely defined group of volunteers presented the prosocial personality and attitude profile found in some previous research and (b) to examine changes in these characteristics as a function of working as tutors with 4and 5-year-old children in an inner-city preschool program designed to facilitate reading readiness.