The well-being of adults who volunteer with children at risk of child maltreatment

The lack of sufficient foster care homes, their inconsistent quality, and their risk of increasing negative outcomes for children highlight the need for more people to be involved in roles that support children at risk of maltreatment and foster care. While volunteer opportunities exist for supporting children after foster care placements, few opportunities exist to care for children who are at risk of maltreatment and foster care. Innovative approaches are being developed to provide such opportunities. These approaches may find support from an emerging literature that has found a positive relationship between volunteerism and well-being. However, no studies have investigated the well-being of those who volunteer with children at risk of maltreatment and/or child welfare involvement. This dissertation, which is an exploratory, cross-sectional, quantitative study, will address this gap with a sample of volunteers (N = 302) from Safe Families for Children (SFFC), a faith-based organization that works to keep children safe during family crises, prevent child maltreatment, and reduce the number of children entering the child welfare system. The aim of the dissertation is to investigate whether volunteering and/or motivation are associated with seven dimensions of well-being: Happiness, Physical Health, Life Satisfaction, Self-Mastery, Self-Esteem, Anxiety, and Depression.Results demonstrate limited evidence of significant relationships between volunteering and well-being dimensions. There is also limited evidence of significant relationships between motivation and well-being. However, an important finding of this study is that despite the high time and emotional demands of doing this type of volunteer work, there is no apparent decrease or drop-off in the well-being of the volunteers. Rather, they are happy and physically healthy. They report very low levels of anxiety and depression, and they demonstrate a high degree of Self-Esteem, Self-Mastery, and Life Satisfaction. While some may believe that working with children at risk of maltreatment is stressful and may result in a decrease in well-being (Tyebjee, 2003), the results of this study suggest that it is not the case for Host Families from Safe Families for Children.The Confirmatory Factor Analysis used in this study is a unique contribution to the literature. It robustly demonstrates very reliable methods for operationalizing and measuring seven well-being dimensions as well as four dimensions of motivation. The analyses and results in this study go beyond typically used measurements of reliability and offer strong evidence for reliably measuring well-being in future studies.The most important limitation in this study is the lack of control or comparison group that would allow for investigating the difference in well-being among SFFC volunteers and those who are not SFFC volunteers.This study offers reliable options for future studies to operationalize well-being and motivation in a way that encourages accurate comparison between studies. Future studies should consider whether using measurement scales that can detect small changes in well-being among populations that may have a high level of well-being are important. Implications for practice include recommendations for volunteer managers to focus on volunteer efficiency, the importance of social support, and motivation.