Volunteers with Disabilities at the London 2012 Olympic And Paralympic Games: Who, Why, and Will They Do It Again?

Abstract

People with disabilities are often the recipients of volunteer services but are rarely considered as a potential volunteer resource, such as in sport events where volunteers are an essential component of major sport event operation and legacy potential. For London's 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, there was a determined effort by the Organizing Committee to recruit people with disabilities to be Games Makers (i.e., volunteers). This exploratory research investigated 786 London 2012 volunteers who self-identified as having disability or access needs. The research design involved an online questionnaire examining their motivations for volunteering, their experiences, their likelihood to continue volunteering, and their sociodemographic profile. This article contributes to the literature by examining the motivations of people with disability volunteering at a mega-sport event, as this has not been done previously. The factor analysis identified eight components: transactional; altruistic; it's all about the games; volunteering community; rewards; availability; variety; and application. The solution highlighted the duality of human capital-related transactional components where the individual wanted to improve their skills and the altruistic components of giving back and it's all about the games experience. The discussion examined these components in comparison to other mega-event volunteers to examine commonalities and contrasts.

Motivational profiles of university volunteers in sport events: a segmentation approach

“…The EFA results showed that the KMO index obtained a high value, above 0.90 (Visauta et al, 2005). Regarding the extracted variance it was observed that the three factors extracted allowed an explanation of 61.17% of the variance, results that are similar to those obtained in previous studies that have used this scale (Dickson et al, 2013(Dickson et al, , 2014(Dickson et al, , 2015(Dickson et al, , 2017Khoo & Engerholm, 2007Lockstone-Binney et al, 2015) and higher than the results obtained by Farrell et al (1998). The reliability values using Cronbach's alpha index were higher than the minimum of 0.7 established by Nunnally and Bernstein (1994).…”

“…Values in the load factors greater than 0.30 are indicative that a high percentage of the sample variance is explained by the given factor (Child, 2006). Contrary to this study, previous research showed that the Purposive factor was the most representative (Dickson et al, 2017;Farrell et al, 1998;Khoo & Engelhorm, 2007;. The Commitment/External Traditions showed similar load factors as reported in previous studies (Johnston et al, 1999;Lockstone-Binney et al, 2015).…”

“…This study aimed to evaluate the motivation of university students' volunteers participating in sports events, identifying different profiles of volunteers according to their degree of motivation. The SEVMS questionnaire and its adaptations have been applied in sport events of different sizes and levels such as international mega sport events (Dickson et al, 2013(Dickson et al, , 2014(Dickson et al, , 2017; international sport events (Dickson, et al, 2015;Lockstone-Binney et al, 2015;Pauline & Pauline, 2009); and national sport events (Farrell et al, 1998;Khoo & Engelhorn, 2007Strigas & Jackson, 2003). In a previous analysis of the type and size of the event to which the SEVMS scale has been applied Dickson et al (2017) did not find evidence of the existence of studies focused on local and small-scale sport events such as the events examined in this study.…”

Bourdieu’s practice theory as a multilevel framework for exploring change in disability sport: a case study of disability cricket

“…Importantly at this micro-level, researchers have been more successful at increasing the voices and experiences of disabled people. Disabled people's interaction with multi-level barriers that prevent social inclusion is a common theme, whether in participation (Darcy et al, 2017;Darcy & Dowse, 2013;Ives et al, 2021;Sotiriadou & Wicker, 2014), spectatorship (Brown, 2020;García et al, 2017;Paramio-Salcines et al, 2018;Penfold & Kitchin, 2020), or employment in sport (Dickson et al, 2017;Kappelides & Spoor, 2019;Wright & Cunningham, 2017). Kappelides and Spoor (2019) examined the experiences of disabled people who volunteered in sport.…”

Intellektuális fogyatékossággal élő emberek a befogadó közösségekért

“…Az inkluzív önkéntesség a fogyatékossággal élő személyek részvételét erősíti a különféle közösségépítő tevékenységekben (Marková 2018), melyek köre diverz és sokszínű területet ölel fel: a mega sportesemények világától kezdve, a munkaerő-piaci beilleszkedést támogató tevékenységeken keresztül, az inklúziót segítő szolgáltatásokig (Hall -Wilton 2011;Dickson et al 2017).…”