Social Workers Who Work With and Without Volunteers: Comparison of Perceptions, Organisational Culture, Training and Experience

Abstract

The study’s aim is to better understand what may foster social workers’ work with volunteers, by comparing workers who work with volunteers (n ¼ 118) and those who do not (n ¼ 169) on four dimensions: perceptions of volunteers’status and contribution, organisationalculture,trainingtoworkwithvolunteers,andpersonalexperienceofvolunteering.Thesampleconsistedof287socialworkersintwenty-sixrandomlysampledmunicipal social service departments in Israel. Almost all the sampled workers were Jewish women. A third had a BSW; two-thirds had an MSW or were studying for one. The findings show that social workers who worked with volunteers differed on almost all the dimensions from those who did not. They perceived volunteers as making greater contributions; were more inclined to view volunteering as having no less value than salaried work; tended to perceive their organisation’s managerial and peer cultures as more supportive of work with volunteers; and were more likely to have had experience of volunteering themselves. These differences, albeit small, suggest that greater use of volunteers may be encouraged by raising social workers’ awareness of the value and contribution of volunteers’ work, and by developing an organisational culture that supports work with volunteers.