Volunteers motivation and sense of community in a sports event

Volunteers are indispensable for sports events. Success of the event is related with their well management and coordination. It is expected that keeping volunteers’ motivation and sense of community levels high will affect both volunteers and event positively. Hence, aim of this research was investigating the perceived senses of community and motivations of volunteers, and examining correlations between sense of community and motivation of sports event volunteers. Four hundred seventy-seven of whom volunteered for 36th Vodafone Istanbul Marathon participated to the study. Two likert scales were employed for data collection. First one was Perceived Sense of Community Scale (PSCS) which was developed by Bishop et. al. (1997). Validity and reliability of this scale was tested by Yıldız (2015). Second one was Special Event Volunteer Motivation Scale (SEVMS) which was developed by Farrell et. al. (1998) and adapted into Turkish by Yıldız, Yıldırım and Koçak (2015). Instruments were applied via e-mail and convenience sampling method was used in data collection process. Descriptive statistics and canonical correlation analysis were utilized in data analysis phase. Findings demonstrated that most of the sports event volunteers were male and university students. Volunteers scored highest points on purposive (M =4.16, SD=.83) whereas, commitments had the lowest (M =2.68, SD=.94). For sense of community; disharmony (M =3.81, SD=.83) had the highest score while mission (M =3.65, SD=.92) had the lowest mean score. In addition, positive and meaningful relationship was found between motivation and sense of community of volunteers (χ2 (12)= 314.94, p=.00). When relationships among variable sets were examined, the first canonical variate value for motivation variables was found as .64, whereas the second canonical variate value for sense of community variables was computed as .60. Moreover, 27% of variance in volunteer motivation was explained by sense of community variables whilst 29% of variance in sense of community was accounted by volunteer motivation variables. Consequently; sense of community was determined as an amplifier of motivation. Moreover