Taking subjectivity and reflexivity seriously: Implications of social constructionism for researching volunteer motivation

Abstract

This paper explores the contributions a social constructionist paradigm can make to researching volunteer motivation, by reflecting on an active membership study of volunteer netball coaches at a New Zealand high school. Social constructionism is based on philosophical assumptions which differ from those of positivism and post-positivism, the dominant paradigms for understanding and representing volunteer motivation. It highlights the social processes through which people give meaning to their motives and views researchers as necessarily implicated in this meaning-making process. Through a critique of the extant literature on volunteer motivation and an illustration of the insights of social constructionism from our empirical study, we consider how our research could be different if we took subjectivity and reflexivity more seriously.