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Community-based clinic volunteering: an evaluation of the direct and indirect effects on the experience of health science college students

BACKGROUND: The present study was conducted in a multi service-learning, student managed and operated, community-based clinic. Its aim was to measure the direct and indirect effects of how proximal factors (i.e., ‘management’, ‘support received’, ‘duration of involvement’, and ‘average time spent pe...

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Autores principales: Bird, Yelena, Islam, Adiba, Moraros, John
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2016
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4717538/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26781996
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-016-0547-y
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author Bird, Yelena
Islam, Adiba
Moraros, John
author_facet Bird, Yelena
Islam, Adiba
Moraros, John
author_sort Bird, Yelena
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: The present study was conducted in a multi service-learning, student managed and operated, community-based clinic. Its aim was to measure the direct and indirect effects of how proximal factors (i.e., ‘management’, ‘support received’, ‘duration of involvement’, and ‘average time spent per month’) and mediators (i.e., ‘training received’, ‘motivation’, and ‘commitment’) influence distal outcomes (i.e., ‘performance’, ‘satisfaction’, and ‘overall experience’) within a volunteer organization. METHODS: Participants were recruited through the use of an email list server. An online survey was used containing multi-item measures from validated scales. Data were collected from 170 volunteers from July to August 2013. Data analysis used a structural equation modeling (SEM) framework for the estimation of direct and indirect effects on constructs and variables of interest. Only statistically significant relationships were reported at p < 0.05. RESULTS: In this study, there are several direct effects worthy of note. First, the proximal factor of ‘management’ plays an important role in influencing the mediators of ‘motivation’ (standardized beta = 0.55) and ‘training received’ (0.65) by the student volunteers but has a relatively small impact on their ‘commitment’ (0.39) to the organization. Second, the mediator of ‘motivation’ proved to have the strongest impact on the distal outcome of volunteer ‘performance’ and ‘satisfaction’ levels (0.41 and 0.58 respectively), whereas ‘commitment’ (0.44) was the key in determining their ‘overall experience’ with the organization. These results in turn, help contextualize the indirect effects observed in our study. Namely, the proximal factor of ‘management’ played a distinctive role in influencing the distal outcomes of volunteer ‘performance’ (0.32) and ‘overall experience’ (0.66), whereas the organizational ‘support received’ by the volunteers was key to their ‘satisfaction’ (0.21). CONCLUSIONS: The findings of the present study shed light into the direct and indirect effects of how proximal factors and mediators, influence student volunteers distal outcomes within a community-based clinic. These results provide useful information and serve as a valuable tool to higher education (curriculum experts, accreditation specialists, students, faculty and administrators) and non-profit community organizations (clients, staff and managers) in their efforts to improve student volunteer satisfaction and performance outcomes.
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spelling pubmed-47175382016-01-20 Community-based clinic volunteering: an evaluation of the direct and indirect effects on the experience of health science college students Bird, Yelena Islam, Adiba Moraros, John BMC Med Educ Research Article BACKGROUND: The present study was conducted in a multi service-learning, student managed and operated, community-based clinic. Its aim was to measure the direct and indirect effects of how proximal factors (i.e., ‘management’, ‘support received’, ‘duration of involvement’, and ‘average time spent per month’) and mediators (i.e., ‘training received’, ‘motivation’, and ‘commitment’) influence distal outcomes (i.e., ‘performance’, ‘satisfaction’, and ‘overall experience’) within a volunteer organization. METHODS: Participants were recruited through the use of an email list server. An online survey was used containing multi-item measures from validated scales. Data were collected from 170 volunteers from July to August 2013. Data analysis used a structural equation modeling (SEM) framework for the estimation of direct and indirect effects on constructs and variables of interest. Only statistically significant relationships were reported at p < 0.05. RESULTS: In this study, there are several direct effects worthy of note. First, the proximal factor of ‘management’ plays an important role in influencing the mediators of ‘motivation’ (standardized beta = 0.55) and ‘training received’ (0.65) by the student volunteers but has a relatively small impact on their ‘commitment’ (0.39) to the organization. Second, the mediator of ‘motivation’ proved to have the strongest impact on the distal outcome of volunteer ‘performance’ and ‘satisfaction’ levels (0.41 and 0.58 respectively), whereas ‘commitment’ (0.44) was the key in determining their ‘overall experience’ with the organization. These results in turn, help contextualize the indirect effects observed in our study. Namely, the proximal factor of ‘management’ played a distinctive role in influencing the distal outcomes of volunteer ‘performance’ (0.32) and ‘overall experience’ (0.66), whereas the organizational ‘support received’ by the volunteers was key to their ‘satisfaction’ (0.21). CONCLUSIONS: The findings of the present study shed light into the direct and indirect effects of how proximal factors and mediators, influence student volunteers distal outcomes within a community-based clinic. These results provide useful information and serve as a valuable tool to higher education (curriculum experts, accreditation specialists, students, faculty and administrators) and non-profit community organizations (clients, staff and managers) in their efforts to improve student volunteer satisfaction and performance outcomes. BioMed Central 2016-01-18 /pmc/articles/PMC4717538/ /pubmed/26781996 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-016-0547-y Text en © Bird et al. 2016 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
spellingShingle Research Article
Bird, Yelena
Islam, Adiba
Moraros, John
Community-based clinic volunteering: an evaluation of the direct and indirect effects on the experience of health science college students
title Community-based clinic volunteering: an evaluation of the direct and indirect effects on the experience of health science college students
title_full Community-based clinic volunteering: an evaluation of the direct and indirect effects on the experience of health science college students
title_fullStr Community-based clinic volunteering: an evaluation of the direct and indirect effects on the experience of health science college students
title_full_unstemmed Community-based clinic volunteering: an evaluation of the direct and indirect effects on the experience of health science college students
title_short Community-based clinic volunteering: an evaluation of the direct and indirect effects on the experience of health science college students
title_sort community-based clinic volunteering: an evaluation of the direct and indirect effects on the experience of health science college students
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4717538/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26781996
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12909-016-0547-y
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