New Study Asks Non-Volunteers Why They Think Other People Volunteer

Why do people volunteer? For decades, psychology has answered that question by asking volunteers themselves, most often through a widely used questionnaire called the Volunteer Function Inventory, or VFI. But a new study published in Discover Psychology argues that this self-report tradition, while productive, has left a crucial blind spot: what does the wider community believe motivates the people who give their time for free? An Italian research team led by Francesco Tommasi of the University of Milan, together with Daiana Colledani of Sapienza University of Rome and Sandro Stanzani and Anna Maria Meneghini of the University of Verona, has now built and validated an adapted version of the VFI designed to capture exactly that outside perspective, drawing on responses from 819 non-volunteers.

The original Volunteer Function Inventory, developed in the late 1990s, organized volunteer motivation into six functional dimensions: values, understanding, social, career, protective, and enhancement. Values reflect altruistic and humanitarian concerns, such as compassion for people in need. Understanding covers the desire to learn new things or exercise knowledge and skills in practice. Social motivations concern relationships, for example volunteering because friends do so or because people close to the volunteer value social service. Career functions include gaining job-related experience or improving a curriculum vitae. Protective functions involve escaping negative feelings, such as guilt about being more fortunate than others or relief from personal problems. Enhancement, finally, captures positive ego growth, including self-esteem, feeling needed, and feeling better about oneself. The instrument has become a cornerstone of volunteerism research, but nearly all of its applications share one methodological feature: the respondent is the volunteer.

That reliance on self-reports is precisely what the new study set out to address. The authors note that the psychological literature has long acknowledged the limitations of self-report assessment, which can be shaped by self-presentation, introspective limits, and the simple fact that people may not fully understand their own motives. Collecting data from respondents other than the volunteers themselves, they argue, offers a complementary window on volunteer motivation. If a community believes, correctly or not, that volunteers are driven by career advancement or by compassion, those beliefs shape how volunteering is perceived, supported, and recruited. A measurement tool that can capture these attributions systematically, rather than anecdotally, therefore fills a genuine gap in the field.

The adapted instrument was administered in a cross-sectional survey to 819 people who do not volunteer. Respondents were given instructions that mirror the original VFI but with a crucial shift in perspective: taking into account people who engage in volunteering activities, how important do you deem the following reasons for them to take up volunteering? Each item was rated on a five-point scale from not at all important to very important. The item pool, reproduced in the published appendices, contains thirty statements adapted from the original inventory, ranging from volunteering can help them get into a place where they would like to work to they feel compassion for people in need and volunteering makes them feel less lonely.

The psychometric work proceeded in two stages using two random subsamples of the full sample. In the first stage, the researchers applied an exploratory structural equation model, a modern alternative to traditional exploratory factor analysis that allows items to load on multiple factors while still identifying a dominant structure, to select the items that best captured the intended dimensions. In the second stage, they submitted the retained items to a confirmatory factor analysis, which tests whether a predefined factor structure fits an independent dataset. The result was a streamlined eighteen-item scale in which each of the six original functional dimensions is represented by three items, preserving the conceptual architecture of the VFI in a form suitable for non-volunteer respondents.

The eighteen retained items map cleanly onto the six functions. The values dimension includes items such as they care about people who are less fortunate than themselves, they have a genuine concern for the group of people they volunteer with, and they feel compassion for people in need. The social dimension is measured by items about friends who volunteer, people close to the volunteer wanting them to volunteer, and other people close to them placing a high value on social service. Career items cover making business contacts, learning about different job opportunities, and making a curriculum vitae more interesting. Protective items include alleviating guilt, overcoming personal problems, and volunteering as a valid way out of personal problems. Enhancement items concern self-esteem, feeling needed, and feeling better about oneself, while understanding items cover learning through practice, dealing with a variety of people, and testing one’s potential.

A key strength of the validation is the attention paid to measurement invariance, the statistical property that a scale measures the same construct in the same way across different groups. The researchers tested configural, metric, and scalar invariance, an increasingly strict hierarchy of equivalence checks. Configural invariance asks whether the same factor structure holds across groups; metric invariance asks whether items relate to their factors with equal strength; and scalar invariance asks whether items behave comparably in terms of their intercepts, a prerequisite for meaningful comparison of average scores. The invariance tests were conducted across gender, across two groups differing in volunteering experience, and across two age groups, providing evidence that the adapted inventory can legitimately be used to compare attributions between men and women, between people with and without volunteering backgrounds, and between younger and older respondents.

The theoretical implications reach beyond psychometrics. Volunteerism research has traditionally treated motivation as a property of the volunteer, something to be measured from the inside. This study formalizes the idea that motivation attributions, the beliefs held by community members about why others volunteer, constitute a measurable psychological construct in their own right. Such attributions may influence whether people consider volunteering themselves, how they evaluate organizations that rely on volunteers, and how they respond to recruitment appeals. If, for instance, non-volunteers disproportionately attribute career motives to volunteers, recruitment campaigns emphasizing altruism might paradoxically fail to resonate with the audience they are trying to reach. A validated community-perspective instrument gives researchers and practitioners a way to test such hypotheses with standardized measures rather than impressions.

The study also speaks to a broader methodological conversation in psychology about the value of multi-informant designs. Just as developmental research routinely combines child, parent, and teacher reports, and organizational research pairs self-ratings with peer ratings, volunteerism research can now pair volunteer self-reports with community attributions. Discrepancies between the two perspectives become data in their own right, potentially revealing stereotypes about volunteering, gaps between lived and perceived motives, or genuine blind spots in self-knowledge. The authors position their adapted VFI as a complement to, not a replacement for, the original instrument, and the open-access publication includes the full item sets for both the thirty-item adapted pool and the final eighteen-item version, making the tool available for replication and cross-cultural adaptation.

The research was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of the Department of Human Sciences at the University of Verona and by the Ethics Committee of SWG S.p.A., and was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and European Union data protection regulation 2016/679, with informed consent obtained from all adult participants. The authors declare no competing interests, and the study received no specific funding from the public, commercial, or non-profit sectors. Published on 11 October 2026 in Discover Psychology under open access, the study, titled The adapted version of the volunteer function inventory to assess the community perspective of volunteer motivation, carries the DOI 10.1007/s44202-026-00923-0. For a field built on the question of why people help, it offers a deceptively simple reframing with substantial consequences: sometimes the most informative answer to why do they volunteer comes from the people who do not.

Subject of Research: Validation of an adapted Volunteer Function Inventory measuring non-volunteers' perceptions of volunteer motivation

Article Title: The adapted version of the volunteer function inventory to assess the community perspective of volunteer motivation

Article References: Tommasi, F., Colledani, D., Stanzani, S., & Meneghini, A. M. (2026). The adapted version of the volunteer function inventory to assess the community perspective of volunteer motivation. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00923-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00923-0

Keywords: volunteerism, Volunteer Function Inventory, psychometrics, scale validation, motivation, prosocial behavior, self-report limitations, measurement invariance, confirmatory factor analysis, exploratory structural equation modeling, community perspective, third sector research