Kindness movements toward a kinder more compassionate world are proliferating worldwide. One of the key challenges facing these movements is attracting and sustaining members. This research identified a range of dispositional, motivational, and contextual factors significantly related to participation in a kindness movement initiated on the Virginia Tech campus after the tragic shootings on April 16, 2007: the AC4P Movement. Strongly resembling existing research on motivational functions served by volunteerism, the present research identified five motives for participation in kindness movements: social action, gratitude expression, social enhancement, impression management, and protective. Additionally, regression analysis identified a model with five significant predictors of participation: required participation, history of traumatic experience, belief that society is in danger, extroversion, and social action motivation. Findings are integrated within the context of Geller's (2016) model of empowerment. / Ph. D. / Kindness movements to inspire a kinder more compassionate culture are proliferating worldwide. These movements reflect a novel and potentially effective means for promote acts of kindness within and between individuals. To date, however, the factors that influence participation in kindness movements have not been systematically investigated. The present research aimed to determine whether key motivational, dispositional, and contextual factors influence participation in a worldwide kindness movement initiated at Virginia Tech: the Actively Caring for People (AC4P) Movement. Participation was defined as having passed an AC4P wristband on to another person as a reward for performing an act of kindness.
Related to prior research on motivation and volunteerism, the present research identified five motives for participating in kindness movements: social action, gratitude expression, social, impression management, and protective. Both social action and gratitude expression related significantly to whether an individual passed on a wristband to reward another person for an act of kindness. How these motives were derived and their defining features are described in the following pages.
A number of dispositional factors (i.e., extroversion, exposure to traumatic experience, religiosity, spirituality, and beliefs regarding the state of the world and the importance of recognizing others for acts of kindness) and contextual factors (i.e., the context in which the AC4P wristband was received and passed on) were also assessed. Extroversion, exposure to traumatic experience, beliefs about the state of the world and the importance of recognizing others, receiving a wristband one-on-one for an act of kindness as opposed to receiving a wristband in a group setting, and being assigned the task of passing on a wristband to another person were all significantly correlated with passing on an AC4P wristband.
Once the motivational, dispositional, and contextual variables that significantly correlated with having passed on a wristband were determined, the relative influence of each variable was assessed. A model was revealed in which five of the included variables, when considered within the context of one another, predicted whether an individual would or would not pass on a wristband with a reasonably high degree of reliability. The five variables were: a group assignment to participate, history of a traumatic experience, belief that society is in danger, extroversion, and social action motivation. These findings were integrated within the context of Geller’s (2016) model of empowerment and their implications for developing intervention strategies to attract and sustain participation are discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/73542 |
| Date | 01 December 2016 |
| Creators | Valentino, Sara Elizabeth |
| Contributors | Psychology, Geller, E. Scott, Clum, George A., Winett, Richard A., Jones, Russell T. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Dissertation |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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