Volunteers and Non-Volunteers: Social justice cognitions and engagement in voluntary work activity

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Elisabeth Kals
• Co-Applicant: Professor Dr. Theo Wehner
• Subject Area: Social Psychology, Industrial and Organisational Psychology
• Term: from 2011 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 197369008

Although themes of justice and prosocial behavior have a long research tradition, the literature on the influence of justice perceptions on sustained prosocial behavior is rather moderate. Our theoretical framework integrates different established approaches and addresses the issue of justice perceptions and their relation to the willingness or unwillingness to volunteer. The following five attributes qualify our project: (1) Applying the reasoned action approach and augmenting it with emotional variables; (2) Investigating explained variance of sustained helping behavior by justice cognitions, dispositions and judgments in comparison to the established antecedents volunteer functions and norm- as well as control-related cognitions; (3) Moving beyond the dichotomy of altruism vs. egoism as sole motives of prosocial activity and revealing the complex moral motive of justice; (4) Applying extracts of a justice research instrument that has been developed considering the German speaking cultural background; (5) Building on a definition of prosocial behavior as a sustained, organized form of behavior that could possibly be remunerated. The proposed project focuses on a sample of volunteers in the social sector, as well as non-volunteers in Switzerland and Germany to allow for different multilevel analyses. A crosssectional approach is applied to test correlation and regression hypotheses. Prior to that, a pretest as well as validity and reliability analyses will be conducted in order to edge the research tool.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Switzerland