“Volunteering Abroad: For You or for Me?”: An Evaluation of Voluntourism Companies Performances Through Examining the Relationship Between Recipient-Centered Objectives and Expenses

Overview

The voluntourism market is a profitable niche within the tourism industry, and that follows a close critique to the practice of volunteering abroad. The researcher aims to analyze the nature of voluntourism companies in the way they spend their money and what their objectives are, in order to evaluate volunteer trips. The researcher wanted to find out if the companies studied were giving more or less money than they were indicating they were in their objective statements by grading the companies. The researcher obtained financial reports from seven volunteer abroad companies and put those finances into percentages, based on if the expenses went to the volunteer, recipient, or neutral. They coded the objective statements of those volunteer abroad websites, coding them through a coding system of 84 words, into the same categories volunteer-centered, recipient- centered, and neutral. From that, the researcher took the percentages of language and expenses and put them into a linear regression. They then found the residuals of each individual data point. They found that most of the companies fell below a Cgrade, or the average grade of all the companies relative to each other, on the grading scale for recipient-centeredness objectives and expenses. This brought evidence for the idea that voluntourism operations are becoming less recipient-centered, despite it being one of the most popular motives to “help a community abroad.” The researcher hoped to bridge the gap between recipients and the voluntourism company operators, in making the voluntourism experience an enabling endeavor for everyone involved. DODEA PACIFIC

Competition history

• JSHS 2022 Category not listed

Resources

• National JSHS abstract book ↗

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.