A Review Essay

I use a volunteer process model to organize a review of recent research on volunteerism, focusing mainly on journal articles reporting survey research results. Scholars from several different disciplines and countries have contributed to a body of work that is becoming more theoretically sophisticated and methodologically rigorous. The first stage of the process model—antecedents of volunteering—continues to attract the most attention but more and more scholars are paying attention to the third stage, the consequences of volunteering, particularly with respect to health benefits. The middle stage—the experience of volunteering—remains somewhat neglected, particularly the influence of the social context of volunteer work on the volunteer’s satisfaction and commitment. Keywords volunteers, motivations, resources, experiences, consequences In the last quarter of a century the study of volunteer work has assumed its rightful place at the core of the social sciences, no longer relegated to the status of a peripheral and inconsequential leisure pursuit or dismissed as an oddity in a world largely given over to the pursuit of self-interest. Since the publication of Smith’s (1975) initial assessment of the study of “voluntary participation, ” theories have become more sophis-ticated, methods more refined, and data more abundant. Articles on volunteering are to be found in an ever-expanding range of scholarly journals. In this review article I describe the research on volunteerism published since 2008 when Marc Musick and I concluded our work on Volunteers: A Social Profile, with the addition of a few studies we overlooked at the time. I do not attempt to give thorough descriptions of every study but focus instead on what I believe to be the most interesting at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on May 10, 2016nvs.sagepub.comDownloaded fro