Looking on the SUNEE side: An analysis of student volunteering on a university sports-based outreach project

This thesis provides an in-depth study into the development of student volunteers’ motivation during their participation in a sports-based outreach project and how their experiences during the programme serve to influence their commitment and retention to it. The Sport Universities North East England (SUNEE) project represents an alliance between the region’s five universities to tackle social exclusion, and promote and nurture social capital and civil responsibility through the vehicle of sport. This joined-up approach to sports development provides the region’s student volunteers with vast opportunities to gain both experience and qualifications as sports coaches, mentors and leaders by working with a range of ‘hard to reach’ groups. This qualitative investigation utilises data generated from semi-structured interviews (n=40) and describes a sequence of social and psychological transitions undertaken by student volunteers over the course of their involvement in the project. This interdisciplinary investigation unravels the socio-cognitive processes underlying volunteer persistence and satisfaction, or conversely, those which serve to forestall motivation and potentially lead to participant drop out. The research makes a contribution to the established body of knowledge by using the example of the SUNEE project to demonstrate how motivations to volunteer change from ‘extrinsic’ (for example, instrumental reasons such as being perceived by students to enhance their employability profile) to ‘intrinsic’ (such as ‘enjoying the experience’) regulators of behaviour, the longer the person has taken part in the project. This contribution is new because it takes the theories of Deci and Ryan and uses them to understand issues of student volunteering in sports-based outreach projects, providing a novel application of their work. Thus, this research provides a framework that can be utilised to identify, interpret and facilitate students’ motivation to volunteer.