Motivation of Volunteers Performing Canistherapy

Abstract Voluntarism has recently been a more and more spoken point, and it has been popular with people of various ages in the society. The aim of this thesis: The Motivation of Volunteers Practising Canistherapy, is to find out, why the volunteers engage exactly in canistherapeutical activity and what is their main motivation. The next intention is to find out, in what way the coordinators of a particular programme work with the motivation of the volunteers and how they develop it. Within this thesis there has been defined another research issue: Why the volunteers devote their free time particularly to the canistherapeutical work, and one more partial research issue: What is the way the coordinators work with the motivation of the volunteers. The Bachelor thesis has been divided into a theoretical and practical part. The theoretical part has been completely devoted to the topic of zootherapy, mainly to its historical development. Next it has been devoted to the canistherapy itself, mainly to its participants, forms, techniques and its use in the society. Another part deals with the voluntarism from the point of view of choosing of the suitable volunteers, training of the volunteers, organisations that provide with the voluntarism in the sphere of canistherapy and coordinators of particular programmes including the helpful supervision. Last but not least it the part about motivation, mainly about the motivation of volunteers and its reinforcement.In the practical part there has been used the qualitative research strategy, the method of questioning and the technique of focus group. The selected set N1 has consisted of the volunteers who have practised canistherapy at least for 6 months and the set N2 have been the coordinators of the particular programme. The number of respondents in the set N1 is ten and in the set N2 is five. The data has been processed via the content analysis of dialogues. There have been addressed ten volunteers who have devoted themselves to voluntarism in the sphere of canistherapy for more than six mohths, so they have the necessary experience. The results of the research have shown that mainly women are engaged in canistherapy. The main motivation of the volunteers for practising of the canistherapeutical service is mostly their dog, that they want to devote their free time to, but at the same time, these people want to engage in the sphere of voluntarism to help other people. Another inspiration for the volunteers, have been their friends, who had practised canistherapy before. From the research there also arises that this activity enables some personal benefits, i. e. getting new skills, experiences and information that the volunteers subsequently use and consider them to be very highly-valued. These personal benefits subsequently lead them to the very important motivation. The research also shows that voluntarism has very strongly influenced the life of the volunteers and their sight of the world. Mainly from the point of view of reappraise of their life priorities, they consider mainly health to be really important. They also realize that the free time they invest is used to good purpose. At the same time these respondents want to devote to canistherapy in the future. The thesis can be used as motivation for other potential volunteers, who would like to take part in the process of canistherapy. Thanks to this thesis more privates than so far could be involved into canistherapy and also more organizations that are able to support voluntarism in this sphere. The public can get some more information about this activity and engage more in this sphere. The training canistherapeutical association Hafík, in which the research took place, is going to be provided with this thesis, because they have been interested in it