Motivations, Concerns, and Benefits of International Volunteering in Hungary

Abstract This paper’s objective was to reveal the Hungarian population’s knowledge and attitude about international volunteering. The study compared the opinion of returned volunteers with that of those population groups that had no international volunteering experiences and drew conclusions about the similarities and differences. The article aimed to evaluate the perceived roles and impacts of volunteering as well as the experienced difficulties and challenges. The study evaluated the results of a quantitative online survey collecting the opinion of 344 respondents including 73 returned international volunteers. The sampling used was convenient and non-representative; however, efforts were made to contact respondents with various demographic background and volunteer-related experiences. Detailed SPSS-based factor and cluster analyses were used to identify homogeneous groups for data comparison. The general awareness about international volunteering is low in Hungary, still most of the respondents agree with its ideology. The positive effects of volunteering imposed on the volunteers’ persons were named as the most important advantage but only few respondents found it beneficiary for the donor country or its economy. Returned volunteers were challenged by local cultural habits as well as project management difficulties in the recipient countries. Strong correlations were experienced in the opinion of women, university graduates, and respondents with domestic volunteering background, all of them having significantly bigger knowledge and understanding level compared to those of other segment groups.