The Chinese People’s Re-intention on Volunteering—The Interpretations from a Theoretical Framework of Consumer Behavior and the Influences of Perceived Moral Obligation

Abstract

Volunteers were a key human resource for non-profit (non-governmental) organizations (NPO/NGO). How to maintain a certain number of volunteers in order to guarantee the voluntary activities is a point of concern. Excepts for continuously attracting new volunteers, increasing the participation frequency of those volunteers who have participated before might be a good way. They were taken as consumers who made decisions based on transactional thinking in volunteer service in the study. We included 312 respondents who are registered or unregistered on the Chinese Volunteer Service website into the research sample. Based on the theoretical framework of consumer behavior, a five-dimensional questionnaire was designed to measure the factors as perceived service quality, perceived value, satisfaction, intention on volunteering, and perceived moral obligation. Results showed that perceived service quality and satisfaction had a significant positive impact on the intention to volunteering service, but not the perceived value. Satisfaction with voluntary activities explained both associations between the perception of service quality and the perception of the value of the voluntary activities with the re-intentions. The perceived moral obligations have influences on the associations between the re-intentions with the perceived value and the satisfaction , as previous literatures mentioned. In addition, the results showed that there are differences of re-intentions on the demographic characteristics.