Our focus is on illness and loneliness: Volunteer work engagement, compassion satisfaction, compassion fatigue, self-care and motivations to volunteer

Abstract

[eng] They are participating as a volunteer implies active personal positioning accompanying others. Evidence supports that experiences of those who experience an illness, who are hospitalised or feel lonely, impact the volunteers: positive emotions like engagement and Compassion Satisfaction (CS) or, the reverse, Compassion Fatigue (CF). Motivations help us understand why volunteers spend their time on these activities. And self-care practices will be a challenge to counteract the exhausting emotions of volunteering. This research presents a mixed, exploratory and sequential design study on the island of Majorca (Spain). The first phase (n = 216) was quantitative, gathering data from November 2018 to April 2019. Then, the second phase (two focus groups) started with qualitative data collection (July 2019). Firstly, the study determines CS and work engagement levels and examines the relationship between self-care, CF and motivations. Secondly, the study finds out how they recognise their positive and negative emotions, their relationship with self-care and what motivates them to be volunteers. The results show that the volunteers report highly positive feelings associated with their volunteering (CS and engagement) and are backed up by a good level of personal Self-Care. The Understanding and Enhancement motivational functions generate even more positive feelings for the volunteers themselves, who attach a positive value to their experience of caring for others. Despite the positive results collected, we must not ignore the phenomenon of CF in relational volunteering and pain support because it occurs. After all, that could lead to abandonment by volunteers.