Student volunteering in Sweden and themotivations driving this phenomenon : A quantitative research on Swedish universities

Sammanfattning: This bachelor thesis is related to the phenomenon of student volunteering, in Sweden, the field of study and its own context. Our argumentation is based on the concept of “motivation” and focused on the students of universities in Sweden. In order to lead this research, we created a survey and sent it to the 14 Erasmus Student Networks (ESN) of Sweden in order to use their database and spread the survey. We wanted to answer our research question: What are the motivations behind student volunteering in a Swedish context? We obtained 123 answers related to items of interest for our study: the motivations to start volunteering, the abilities students improved, how often student volunteer and why they don’t volunteer, for example. Moreover, we proposed a typology of volunteers depending on their frequency of volunteering. Note that most of the answers came from the city of Växjö, which consist of one of the biggest limitations of the results. We answered 6 hypothesis but only 4 of them found a suitable answer. Our findings are as following: younger surveyees tend to volunteer more frequently than older ones. Regarding their origins (Swedish or international student), it is not confirmed that volunteers want to improve different abilities and have different motives to volunteer. Furthermore, it is confirmed that students volunteer following intrinsic motivations more than extrinsic ones. Finally, we pointed out that Swedish students who are not studying at their home town volunteer for organizations in order to meet new people and to make new friends.