A typology of AIDS volunteers

Based on our research of volunteers at Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) in New York City, we developed a typology of AIDS volunteers derived from their responses to our Reasons for Volunteering scale. The scale included six basic reasons, three of which were AIDS-specific and three of which represented more general reasons for doing volunteer work. Cluster analysis was used to identify sub-groups in this sample, from which we identified seven distinct and meaningful types of volunteers. One type, which we labeled Self-Sacrificers, is the closest we could find to a group of altruists-volunteers who indicated that self-gain was unimportant to them. While the volunteers who endorsed AIDS-related reasons for volunteering were most likely to be gay men and to have had significant prior AIDS-related experiences, each cluster was markedly heterogeneous in terms of demographic characteristics. Implications are drawn for the management of volunteers in community-based AIDS organizations and for further research on helping behavior and altruism.