Characteristics of Hungarian volunteers in a generational approach, or what do we know about the parents of generation Z?
Hajnalka Fényes – Anna Mária Bartal – Miklós Gyorgyovich
Abstract
Previous Hungarian research on volunteering has mainly focused on the volunteering of "young people", Generation Z or the older generation, with these generations usually being analysed separately. In contrast, our research closes this gap by examining the generational characteristics of Hungarian volunteers based on a representative survey of 2,000 people from the project "Volunteering in Hungary 2023". The main aim of the analysis was to explore the sociodemographic background, external and internal motivations, and characteristics of volunteering of formal volunteers belonging to different generations. The other goal was to specify the characteristics of formal volunteers of Generation X and Y who have been "neglected" in Hungarian research – as parents of Generation Z. To provide a theoretical foundation, the study reviewed modern generational theories and projected Róbert- Valuch's Hungarian generational map onto the historical nodes of the domestic civil (non-profit) and volunteer sectors. With the assumption that this presents an appropriate context for interpreting the various volunteering patterns of different generations. The study used bivariate methods and principal component analysis in addition to descriptive statistics. The research questions were applied on a subsample of 382 people from the original sample, which included volunteers who had volunteered within formal organisational frameworks. The results showed that the members of Generations X and Y of the formal volunteers were most similar in that both generations exhibited a high level of educational and economic stability. In terms of intrinsic motivations, the X and Y generations were similar in that they were mostly characterised by community-ecological motivations. This result differs from those described in the international literature, which considered these motivations to be particularly characteristic of the Z generation. In addition, the research found that new types of volunteer motivations appear not only in generation Z, but also in Generation Y. Further targeted research should analyse whether there might be a transfer of motivational models between the "parents" of Generation Y and the "children" of Generation Z in this area. The majority of Generation X and Generation Y have been involved in civil society organisations during their volunteering. In both generations, the dominant activities are social, health, environmental protection, and community development activities that address particular social and community issues, as well as volunteering related to self-development, recreational sports, and leisure. An important result of our research is that while two-fifths of Generation X were regular volunteers; there is already a slight shift towards episodic and occasional volunteering among Generation Y and Generation Z. Two years after the pandemic, the majority from each generation reported personal, offline volunteering, and in Generation Y, they even experienced the phenomenon of "digital detox".
Keywords: generations, formal volunteers, sociodemographic background, motivations and characteristics of volunteering, quantitative secondary analysis