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Andreas Kewes
German Sport University Cologne, Germany
This blog post is a travelogue. It describes my journey into the world of volunteering, which culminated in my research article “Dropouts in Volunteering and the Role of the Multidimensional Experiential Space.” The journey began in the early 2010s. At that time, my colleague Chantal Munsch from the University of Siegen, Germany, and I wanted to find out why people drop out of volunteering for charitable organizations. We were familiar with research on lack of resources, i.e., the research insight that volunteers give up their involvement due to lack of time, for example. However, this result seemed too individualized to us. We wanted to know whether social situations and group conflicts played a greater role in these withdrawals than had previously been assumed. That is why we focused our sample on welfare organizations: in Germany, they clearly originate from milieus such as Catholicism, Protestantism, or the working class, for example. At the time, we thought we could show that such milieus of engagement still exist, that they shaped the organizations, and that new volunteers were bothered by this. To further emphasize this perspective in our sampling, we interviewed former volunteers with their own migration histories, because we thought they would certainly be outside the milieu ties.
This project was publicly funded. We used open interviews for data collection so that the (former) activists themselves could develop their stories and set priorities. To make a long story short, the study did not produce the expected results. Neither was it possible to identify a milieu for the everyday practice of volunteering, nor did the volunteers say that their organization remained culturally alien to them. However, the volunteers did tell us that their work in welfare was exhausting because, in their view, volunteers in welfare organizations were expected to behave in a very specific way, which ran counter to their original intentions. The resulting constraints—the demands of the organization or the field on the one hand, and empathy with and advocacy for the beneficiaries on the other—then reinforced further discomfort with volunteering, whether due to time constraints or poor health. In group discussions with volunteers from the welfare sector who had not (yet) given up, however, we learned that they had also experienced tensions – so experiencing tension seemed to us to be typical of any volunteer experience.
Based on this insight into the significance of the specific subject of the volunteers’ work, we considered that there must also be other constraints in other fields of engagement. We therefore applied for a second research grant, which enabled us to make comparisons with the first study and thus deepen our understanding of field-specific tensions. We conducted research in sports clubs, parishes, and environmental initiatives, as these seemed to us to be sufficiently contrasting cases for comparison. We had learned this much in the meantime: Although we asked the volunteers about the end of their involvement, in order to present this as a meaningful decision, the volunteers usually had to go into detail and sometimes had to begin their story with events that happened before they became involved. Through our research, we learned a lot about volunteering itself.
In the second project, we learned that former activists did indeed tell their stories differently depending on where they were active, i.e., how the organizational field of their activism was structured and institutionalized: They reported, for example, on other activists in their field who wanted to take their activism in completely different directions. Activists also talked about necessary organizational developments for which they were sometimes more, sometimes less responsible, depending on whether there were full-time staff or not. But they also reported on powerful opponents, such as government agencies. Here, too, we found similar representations in the group discussions within the same field, although never quite as drastic as in the stories of abandonment in the interviews. Nevertheless, our key insight was reinforced: fields of action in engagement create specific, tension-filled experiences of engagement.
Comparing the narratives from different fields also raised the question of whether and how engagement narratives are similar across different fields. We found quite similar narratives about what it is like when the meaning of engagement increasingly threatens to slip away, when cooperation does not work, or when the time spent simply cannot be justified in the context of the rest of the day or life. Through these comparisons, we came across a second dimension of the experience of volunteering: it was not only the fields of action that structured the narratives, but also the fact that volunteering always represents a form of collaborative work, which in the best case fills those involved with pride (and in the worst case causes emotional pain) and which must be justified in terms of time.
At this point, the trip was unfortunately over for my colleagues who had accompanied me, and I treated myself to an additional, admittedly more conceptual and theoretical excursion. I wanted to summarize the insight that we find two typical narrative styles in our material in a way that was even more concise for the research community. The argument is as follows:
The two dimensions of experience – field experience and work experience – cannot be mutually resolved in one way or the other. It cannot be said that cooperation in parishes is fundamentally more successful than in sports clubs, or that problems arise in environmental activism because the time spent on it cannot be justified. Because volunteer work is usually open to the public and brings different people together, successful cooperative relationships are needed in parishes as well as in environmental initiatives. When people with different ideas about how a parish should develop or how radical the environmental initiative should be, the willingness to cooperate reaches its limits. I have thus identified different dimensions of experience that are not mutually dependent, like the straight lines of a multidimensional space (time would be another dimension; further comparisons might perhaps yield additional dimensions of experience in the future).
So I travel with my interviews and group discussions into the spaces of volunteering that are described. Let’s imagine such a space as a room. It is good if this room is a three-dimensional space bounded by walls to the hallway or the neighboring room, thus providing a sense of security. But ceilings and floors are also good, so that it doesn’t rain in and you don’t fall into the deep. However, in our imagination, walls and ceilings are also fundamentally different, even though they are connected: walls support ceilings, floors hold up walls. Enclosed spaces can withstand a certain amount of pressure (e.g., people hammering in neighboring rooms). But too much pressure on one or the other side of the room destroys it and damages the space as a whole. In recent years, I have received numerous reports of rooms destroyed in this way. I believe it is worthwhile to view volunteering (and also the termination of volunteering) as a multidimensional space that comes under pressure from various sides. In this context, the use of resources—such as the time spent—is no longer an objective variable, but rather a commodity that can be justified in light of experience, or not. Metaphorically speaking: Would I like to spend time in a room where I have a great view of the sea, but where it rains in and the wind whistles through?
In my opinion, it is less interesting for third sector research and promotion to know when and how individuals want to spend their time in such a questionable space, but rather what (experiential) spaces are offered in volunteering and how such spaces can be designed. The concept of experiential space is my contribution to the scientific community from my scientific journey.
Click here to read the free full-text article: Kewes, A. (2026). Dropouts in Volunteering and the Role of the Multidimensional Experiential Space. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/08997640251411239
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