Development and Testing a Volunteer Screening Tool for Assessing Community Health Volunteersʼ Motives at Recruitment and Placement in Western Kenya.
In times of inadequate resources and rising public demand, social service organizations rely on volunteers to meet needs. In the current human resource for health crisis in Africa there is urgent need for community health volunteers. Studies have highlighted problems of high attrition rates leading to high replacement training costs among CHVs. There is need for careful selection of volunteers that can serve long-term, once trained. This study was done to develop a volunteer assessment framework for recruitment of CHVs.
From literature we identified functional, role identity, and social exchange as theories underpinning volunteering. From these theories we identified 8 constructs to include in a proposed volunteer assessment framework. We tested the framework and although all the eight constructs.
We propose a volunteer assessment tool with the 5 constructs and 25 assessment items for identification and recruitment of CHVs, with motives consistent with long-term volunteer service. The final framework consists of altruistic or egoistic constructs with 25 assessment statements. The frame work would able to identify individuals with altruistic motives to include and those with egoistic tendencies to exclude during a volunteer recruitment exercise.
Using this framework to assess volunteers at recruitment would improve retention after training and thus reduce costs by minimizing replacement. This would improve the cost-efficiency of community volunteer programs. The paper focuses on the development and testing of a volunteer assessment framework for Western Kenya.
This paper presents the development and testing of a theory based framework for identifying volunteers likely to serve for long as community health volunteers, based their motives for volunteering. Using this framework to assess volunteers at recruitment would improve retention after training and thus reduce costs by minimizing replacement.
