Current and former Missouri Master Gardeners were asked to respond to each of 30 reasons (an adaptation of the Volunteer Functions Inventory [VFI]) for doing volunteer work. Principal factor analysis confirmed the presence of six principal components of volunteer motivation. Master Gardener functions related to new learning experiences (understanding) were equally as important as functions related to altruism (values). Satisfactions related to self-esteem (enhancement) ranked next in motivational importance. Motivations concerning relationships with others (social), protecting the ego (protective) and functions related to preparation for a new career (career), concluded the list. In addition, respondents were asked to indicate whether they were presently volunteering as a Master Gardener, how many years they had been active in the program, and level of volunteer time commitment to the program in the past year. In most cases, no correlations or statistical differences were found among respondents belonging to different demographic categories, making demographic information a poor predictor of motivation for volunteering. However, those who volunteered more time during the past year were more likely to highly rate certain motivational factors.

Current and former Missouri Master Gardeners were asked to respond how strongly they agreed or disagreed with a list of benefits provided by the Master Gardener program. The survey instrument was an adaptation of Rohs and Westerfield's (1996) Master Gardener Societal and Personal Benefits survey. Questions were assigned to one of the six principal components of volunteer motivation developed by Clary et al. (1998): Understanding, Values, Enhancement, Social, Protective, and Career. Master Gardeners who are currently active volunteers in the program were more likely to respond favorably to many of the benefits provided by the Master Gardener program. Respondents most strongly indicated their agreement that the Master Gardener program, more than any other similar organization, provides benefits related to new learning experiences, exercising knowledge, skills, and abilities, categorized as understanding (U). The overall mean for U was 4.35 on the 5-point Likert scale, a significantly higher score than any other category according to Duncan's multiple range test. Benefits related to personal growth and self-esteem, labeled enhancement (E); those related to altruism and humanitarian concern, labeled values (V); and guilt reduction over being more fortunate than others and addressing one's own personal problems, labeled protective (P), formed the second tier of benefit importance. Benefits related to preparation for a new career or maintaining career-relevant skills, categorized as career (C) were next. Benefits concerning relationships with others, classified as social (S), concluded the list.

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Two print issues per year are mailed to all members of the society upon request and to academic and general libraries around the globe. Issues that are published online only, the aforementioned printed issues, and past issues are available online at scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JOTS. The journal is currently indexed in Current Index to Journals of Education (USA),International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS) (UK), and the International Vocational Education and Training and Research Database at http://www.ncver.edu.au (Australia).

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